sion. For a time we deliberated whether we should be colder
inside the cabin or outside. At length we decided in favor of the
interior. We then took the wagon body off the frame and carried it into
the cabin, and raised it on one side to screen us from the wind which
came through the cabin walls. Against the wall at our head we fixed up
rugs. At our feet, between our bed and the open doorway, we had our
blazing fire. And there we slept. We had prickly sensations in our eyes
in the morning, but they soon passed away. We took no cold, or none that
proved serious at all. And the wolves seemed to keep at a respectable
distance.

As soon as we had got through our breakfast, and put our wagon and team
in order, we started homewards. At one point, as we passed along, a wolf
looked quietly down upon us from the side of a hill just by. A bigger
one had passed us as we stood in front of the half-built cabin in which
we had passed the night. The region abounded with them, on every side.

While crossing a tract of rich bottom land, where the dry and withered
grass of the previous summer lay thick, I struck a light, and for an
experiment, set the prairie on fire. The flames blazed forth at once
like gunpowder. They spread and roared. The wind rose, and blew the
flames in the direction of our wagon. It was all we could do to get to
the wagon and jump in and flee. We had no sooner started the horses than
we found that the traces of one of them were loose, and we had to jump
out again to fasten them; and before we could retake our places the
flames were almost at our ears. The horses fled, however, at a good
quick pace, and speedily carried us beyond the reach of danger, and we
got safe home.

2. There were many things in my new situation and in my strange way of
life, besides the silence and the solitude of a boundless desert, that
were calculated to awaken within me solemn feeling, and to rouse me to
serious thoughtfulness on things pertaining to God and religion. And
when once my mind had begun to awake to such matters, it was never
permitted to sink again, for any length of time, into its former
death-like slumber. And many things befel me that tended to make me
feel, and feel most painfully at times, the helplessness and
cheerlessness, the gloom and wretchedness, of the man who has lost his
trust in God, and his hope of a blessed immortality. There is nothing in
utter doubt and unbelief to satisfy a man with a heart. A man with