there with black patches to show that the early ploughing had begun. The
snow lies in a last few streaks and whirls by the track; from sky-line
to sky-line is black loam and prairie grass so dead that it seems as
though no one year's sun would waken it. This is the granary of the land
where the farmer who bears the burdens of the State--and who, therefore,
ascribes last year's bumper crop to the direct action of the McKinley
Bill--has, also, to bear the ghastly monotony of earth and sky. He keeps
his head, having many things to attend to, but his wife sometimes goes
mad as the women do in Vermont. There is little variety in Nature's big
wheat-field. They say that when the corn is in the ear, the wind,
chasing shadows across it for miles on miles, breeds as it were a
vertigo in those who must look and cannot turn their eyes away. And they
tell a nightmare story of a woman who lived with her husband for
fourteen years at an Army post in just such a land as this. Then they
were transferred to West Point, among the hills over the Hudson, and she
came to New York, but the terror of the tall houses grew upon her and
grew till she went down with brain fever, and the dread of her delirium
was that the terrible things would topple down and crush her. That is a
true story.

They work for harvest with steam-ploughs here. How could mere horses
face the endless furrows? And they attack the earth with toothed,
cogged, and spiked engines that would be monstrous in the shops, but
here are only speckles on the yellow grass. Even the locomotive is
cowed. A train of freight cars is passing along a line that comes out of
the blue and goes on till it meets the blue again. Elsewhere the train
would move off with a joyous, vibrant roar. Here it steals away down the
vista of the telegraph poles with an awed whisper--steals away and sinks
into the soil.