tempted to sell my
horse and take the stage to Bloomington, but the roads were even worse
to a traveller on wheels than to one in the saddle, and the sunny day
which followed my arrival flattered me with the hope that others as fair
might succeed it.

The distance to Bloomington was forty miles, and the road none of the
best; yet, as my horse "Peck" (an abbreviation of "Pecatonica") had had
two days' rest, I did not leave Peoria until after the usual dinner at
twelve o'clock, trusting that I should reach my destination by eight or
nine in the evening, at the latest. Broad bands of dull, gray, felt-like
clouds crossed the sky, and the wind had a rough edge to it which
predicted that there was rain within a day's march.

The oaks along the rounded river-bluffs still held on to their leaves,
although the latter were entirely brown and dead, and rattled around me
with an ominous sound, as I climbed to the level of the prairie, leaving
the bed of the muddy Illinois below. Peck's hoofs sank deeply into the
unctuous black soil, which resembled a jetty tallow rather than earth,
and his progress was slow and toilsome. The sky became more and more
obscured: the sun faded to a ghastly moon, then to a white blotch in the
gray vault, and finally retired in disgust. Indeed, there was nothing in
the landscape worth his contemplation. Dead flats of black, bristling
with short corn-stalks, flats of brown grass, a brown belt of low woods
in the distance,--that was all the horizon inclosed: no embossed bowl,
with its rim of sculptured hills, its round of colored pictures, but a
flat earthen pie-dish, over which the sky fell like a pewter cover.

After riding for an hour or two over the desolate level, I descended
through rattling oaks to the bed of a stream, and then ascended through
rattling oaks to the prairie beyond. Here, however, I took the wrong
road, and found myself, some three miles farther, at a farm-house, where
it terminated. "You kin go out over the perairah yander," said the
farmer, dropping his maul beside a rail he had just split off,--"there's
a plain trail from Sykes's that'll bring you onto the road not fur from
Sugar Crick." With which knowledge I plucked up heart and rode on.

What with the windings and turnings of the various cart-tracks, the
family resemblance in the groves of oak and hickory, and the heavy,
uniform gray of the sky, I presently lost my compass-needle,--that
natural instinct of direction, on whic