able to get away except in summer, and then we always
preferred to go over the old ground, out to Niagara and back through
Canada, the route we took on our wedding journey. The children like it as
much as we do."

"Yes, yes," said Fulkerson. "Well, the natural-gas country is worth
seeing. I don't mean the Pittsburg gas-fields, but out in Northern Ohio
and Indiana around Moffitt--that's the place in the heart of the gas
region that they've been booming so. Yes, you ought to see that country.
If you haven't been West for a good many years, you haven't got any idea
how old the country looks. You remember how the fields used to be all
full of stumps?"

"I should think so."

"Well, you won't see any stumps now. All that country out around Moffitt
is just as smooth as a checker-board, and looks as old as England. You
know how we used to burn the stumps out; and then somebody invented a
stump-extractor, and we pulled them out with a yoke of oxen. Now they
just touch 'em off with a little dynamite, and they've got a cellar dug
and filled up with kindling ready for housekeeping whenever you want it.
Only they haven't got any use for kindling in that country--all gas. I
rode along on the cars through those level black fields at corn-planting
time, and every once in a while I'd come to a place with a piece of
ragged old stove-pipe stickin' up out of the ground, and blazing away
like forty, and a fellow ploughing all round it and not minding it any
more than if it was spring violets. Horses didn't notice it, either.
Well, they've always known about the gas out there; they say there are
places in the woods where it's been burning ever since the country was
settled.

"But when you come in sight of Moffitt--my, oh, my! Well, you come in
smell of it about as soon. That gas out there ain't odorless, like the
Pittsburg gas, and so it's perfectly safe; but the smell isn't bad--about
as bad as the finest kind of benzine. Well, the first thing that strikes
you when you come to Moffitt is the notion that there has been a good
warm, growing rain, and the town's come up overnight. That's in the
suburbs, the annexes, and additions. But it ain't shabby--no shanty-farm
business; nice brick and frame houses, some of 'em Queen Anne style, and
all of 'em looking as if they had come to stay. And when you drive up
from the depot you think everybody's moving. Everything seems to be piled
into the street; old houses made over, and new ones going up