while the prairie grass grew rank over soil of unsuspected fertility.
Most dwellings were rude structures made of rough-hewn logs and
designed as makeshifts. Wildcats and wolves prowled through the timber
lands in winter, and game of all sorts abounded.[20] As the stage
swung lazily along, the lad had ample time to let the first impression
of the prairie landscape sink deep. In the timber, the trees were
festooned with bitter-sweet and with vines bearing wild grapes; in the
open country, nothing but unmeasured stretches of waving grass caught
the eye.[21] To one born and bred among the hills, this broad horizon
and unbroken landscape must have been a revelation. Weak as he was,
Douglass drew in the fresh autumnal air with zest, and unconsciously
borrowed from the face of nature a sense of unbounded capacity. Years
afterward, when he was famous, he testified, "I found my mind
liberalized and my opinions enlarged, when I got on these broad
prairies, with only the heavens to bound my vision, instead of having
them circumscribed by the little ridges that surrounded the valley
where I was born."[22] But of all this he was unconscious, when he
alighted from the stage in Jacksonville. He was simply a wayworn lad,
without a friend in the town and with only one dollar and twenty-five
cents in his pocket.[23]

Jacksonville was then hardly more than a crowded village of log cabins
on the outposts of civilized Illinois.[24] Comfort was not among the
first concerns of those who had come to subdue the wilderness. Comfort
implied leisure to enjoy, and leisure was like Heaven,--to be attained
only after a wearisome earthly pilgrimage. Jacksonville had been
scourged by the cholera during the summer; and those who had escaped
the disease had fled the town for fear of it.[25] By this time,
however, the epidemic had spent itself, and the refugees had returned.
All told, the town had a population of about one thousand souls, among