half-soliloquy: "A'n't a bed nur a board in the hull city of Red Owl to
be had for payin' nur coaxin'. Beds is aces. Houses is trumps. Landlords
is got high, low, Jack, and the game in ther hands. Looky there! A
bran-new lot of fools fresh from the factory." And he pointed to the old
steamboat "Ben Bolt," which was just coming up to the landing with deck
and guards black with eager immigrants of all classes.

But Albert Charlton, the student, did not look back any longer. It marks
an epoch in a man's life when he first catches sight of a prairie
landscape, especially if that landscape be one of those great rolling
ones to be seen nowhere so well as in Minnesota. Charlton had crossed
Illinois from Chicago to Dunleith in the night-time, and so had missed
the flat prairies. His sense of sublimity was keen, and, besides his
natural love for such scenes, he had a hobbyist passion for virgin nature
superadded.

"What a magnificent country!" he cried.

"Talkin' sense!" muttered Jim. "Never seed so good a place fer stagin'
in my day."

For every man sees through his own eyes. To the emigrants whose white-top
"prairie schooners" wound slowly along the road, these grass-grown hills
and those far-away meadowy valleys were only so many places where good
farms could be opened without the trouble of cutting off the trees. It
was not landscape, but simply land where one might raise thirty or forty
bushels of spring wheat to the acre, without any danger of "fevernager;"
to the keen-witted speculator looking sharply after corner stakes, at a
little distance from the road, it was just so many quarter sections,
"eighties," and "forties," to be bought low and sold high whenever