tell me stories of the people and the country. "Some years ago," he
said, "a man came to this country, I mean over around the river country
which you saw when you took the steamboat at Bath. He didn't have
anything, but he was ambitious to be rich. How could he do it? Well,
you can work and buy land with your savings, and land here under the
Homestead Act has been $1.25 an acre since 1820; still that may not put
you ahead very fast. And if you're ambitious you want to get rich quick.
That's the way every one here feels who is bent on getting rich. Money
is not as plentiful as land; and if land is only $1.25 an acre it takes
$800 to get a section. That's a lot of money to a man who has nothing.
This land around here is rich as the valley of the Nile. It is six feet
or more of black fertility. I'll bet that some say it will be worth $50
an acre."

I began to wonder why these Americans talk so much. I had observed it
everywhere. Here I was come on a matter of business, of my father's
estate; and the lawyer with whom I was forced to deal was talking to me
interminably of things that had nothing to do with it. But I was young
and strange, and not very strong; and it did not occur to me to show
impatience with him. And so he went on.

"This man was fine to look at, prepossessing and engaging. He looked
like a driver, a man of his word too. And one day when he was standing
on the street here he was approached by a stranger who began to get him
into conversation. You see, we don't have slavery here as a regular
thing. The negroes are sort o' apprenticed--free but apprenticed. But
under pretty severe laws, have to be registered, can't testify, and so
forth. This state is part of the Northwest Territory which was made free
by the old Confederate States in 1787; but we actually had an election
here eleven years ago to make it slave. And the people voted it free.