CHAPTER XIV


This June weather in Illinois! Such glorious white clouds floating in
the boundless hemisphere of fresh blue! The warmth and the vitality of
the air! The glistening leaves of the forest trees! The deep green
shading into purples and blues of the distant woodlands! The sweet
winds, bending the prairie grasses for miles and miles! Glimpses of cool
water in little ponds, in small lakes, in the brook! The whispering of
rushes and the song of thrushes, so varied, so melodious! The call of
the plowman far afield, urging the horses ahead in the great work of
bringing forth the corn! The great moon at night, and the spectacle of
the stars in the hush of my forest hut!

I was superbly well. And for diversion went farther into the woods to
hear a fiddler and to have him teach me the art which fled my dull
fingers and the unwieldy bow. And this fiddler! His curly hair, always
wet from his lustrations for the evening meal; his cud of tobacco; his
racy locutions; his happy and contented spirit; and his merry wife and
the many children, wild like woodland creatures, with sparkling eyes and
overflowing vitality! Many evenings I spent at this fiddler's hut. And
such humbleness! Only the earth for a floor! Only one room where all his
family ate and slept and lived!

In going to St. Louis I took the same stage that had brought me to
Jacksonville. This time I rode on the _City of Alton_, a better boat
than the one that had brought me from La Salle to Bath; but all the
conditions were the same. There was the same roistering and sprawling
crowd; the same loudness and profanity; the same abundance of whisky and