It was sublime! Bird, flower, grass, cloud, wind, and the immense
expanse of sunny prairie, swelling up into undulations like a woman's
breasts turgid with milk for a hungry race. I forgot myself and my
position in the world, my loneliness, my strange passenger, the
problems of my life; my heart swelled, and my throat filled. I sat
looking at it, with the tears trickling from my eyes, the uplift of my
soul more than I could bear. It was not the thought of my mother that
brought the tears to my eyes, but my happiness in finding the newest,
strangest, most delightful, sternest, most wonderful thing in the
world--the Iowa prairie--that made me think of my mother. If I only
could have found her alive! If I only could have had her with me! And as
I thought of this I realized that the woman of the ferry had climbed
over the back of the spring-seat and was sitting beside me.

"I don't wonder," said she, "that you cry. Gosh! It scares me to death!"



CHAPTER VII

ADVENTURE ON THE OLD RIDGE ROAD

Vandemark Township and Monterey County, as any one may see by looking at
the map of Iowa, had to be reached from Wisconsin by crossing the
Mississippi at Dubuque and then fetching across the prairie to the
journey's end; and in 1855 a traveler making that trip naturally fell in
with a good many of his future neighbors and fellow-citizens pressing
westward with him to the new lands.