ily meet my eyes.

The highway which runs a bowshot from _my_ bower-eaves is a
much-travelled road, leading from the farms of a prairie country into a
prairie town. It is a stripe of black earth fifteen or twenty feet wide,
the natural color of the soil, ungraded, ungravelled, and just now half
a foot deep in mud from the melting February snows. Looking in the
direction from which it comes, a mile or two of rolling prairie-land is
visible, divided into farms of one hundred, one hundred and forty or one
hundred and sixty acres. Just now it is faded yellow in hue, with
patches of snow in the hollows, and bare of trees, stumps or fences,
except the almost invisible wire-fences which separate the fields from
the road and from each other. Here and there, at wide intervals, a few
farm-houses can be seen, sheltered on the north and west by a
thickly-set row of cottonwood or Lombardy poplar trees, which serve in a
great measure to break the sweep of the pitiless Iowa winds. Most of the
houses are large and comfortable, and are surrounded by barns, haystacks
and young orchards, denoting a long residence and prosperity; but two or
three, far off on the horizon, are small wooden structures, set on the
bare prairie, without a tree or outbuilding near them, and looking bleak
and lonely. To one who knows something of the straitened lives, the
struggles with poverty, that go on in them, they seem doubly pitiful and
desolate.

The town into which the highway leads lies straight before my window,
flat, unpicturesque, uninteresting, marked by the untidiness of
crudeness and the untidiness of neglect. The ungraded streets are
trodden into a sticky pudding by horses' feet, the board sidewalks are
narrow, uneven and broken, and the crossings are deep in mud. In the
eastern part of the town the dwellings are large, comfortable, even
elegant, with well-kept grounds filled with trees and shrubbery, and
there are a few of the same character scattered here and there
throughout the town; but the large majority of houses, those that give
the place its discouraged, unambitious look, are small wooden dwellings,
a story or a story and a half high, with the end facing the street and a
shed-kitchen behind. Those that are painted are white or brown, but many
are unpainted, have no window-shutters and are surrounded by untidy
yards and fences that need repair.

The centre of the town, both in position and importance, is "The
Square." This is an open s