sty willow bushes growing about it. The road
from the post-office came directly by our door, crossed the farmyard,
and curved round this little pond, beyond which it began to climb the
gentle swell of unbroken prairie to the west. There, along the western
sky-line it skirted a great cornfield, much larger than any field I had
ever seen. This cornfield, and the sorghum patch behind the barn, were
the only broken land in sight. Everywhere, as far as the eye could
reach, there was nothing but rough, shaggy, red grass, most of it as
tall as I.

North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set
strip of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning
yellow. This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to
look very hard to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant
against the grass. It seemed as if the grass were about to run over
them, and over the plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water
is the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour
of winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And
there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be
running.

I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her
sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did
not want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.

The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house,
and the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral.
Grandmother called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with
copper, which hung by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said,
was her rattlesnake cane. I must never go to the garden without a heavy
stick or a corn-knife; she had killed a good many rattlers on her way
back and forth. A little girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was
bitten on the ankle and had been sick all summer.

I can remember exactly how the country looked to me as I walked beside
my grandmother along the faint wagon-tracks on that early September
morning. Perhaps the glide of long railway travel was still with me, for
more than anything else I felt motion in the landscape; in the fresh,
easy-blowing morning wind, and in the earth itself, as if the shaggy
grass were a sort of loose hide, and underneath it herds of wild buffalo
were galloping, galloping...

Alone,