rs that have passed have not dimmed my memory of that first
glorious autumn. The new country lay open before me: there were no
fences in those days, and I could choose my own way over the grass
uplands, trusting the pony to get me home again. Sometimes I followed
the sunflower-bordered roads. Fuchs told me that the sunflowers were
introduced into that country by the Mormons; that at the time of the
persecution, when they left Missouri and struck out into the wilderness
to find a place where they could worship God in their own way, the
members of the first exploring party, crossing the plains to Utah,
scattered sunflower seed as they went. The next summer, when the long
trains of wagons came through with all the women and children, they had
the sunflower trail to follow. I believe that botanists do not confirm
Fuchs's story, but insist that the sunflower was native to those plains.
Nevertheless, that legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-bordered
roads always seem to me the roads to freedom.

I used to love to drift along the pale-yellow cornfields, looking for
the damp spots one sometimes found at their edges, where the smartweed
soon turned a rich copper colour and the narrow brown leaves hung curled
like cocoons about the swollen joints of the stem. Sometimes I went
south to visit our German neighbours and to admire their catalpa grove,
or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of a deep crack in the
earth and had a hawk's nest in its branches. Trees were so rare in that
country, and they had to make such a hard fight to grow, that we used to
feel anxious about them, and visit them as if they were persons. It
must have been the scarcity of detail in that tawny landscape that made
detail so precious.

Sometimes I rode north to the big prairie-dog town to watch the brown
earth-owls fly home in the late afternoon and go down to their nests
underground with the dogs. Antonia Shimerda liked to go with me, and we
used to wonder a great deal about these birds of subterranean habit.
We had to be on our guard there, for rattlesnakes were always lurking
about. They came to pick up an easy living among the dogs and owls,
which were quite defenceless against them; took possession of their
comfortable houses and ate the eggs and puppies. We felt sorry for the
owls. It was always mournful to see them come flying home at sunset and
disappear under the earth. But, after all, we felt, winged things who
would live like that mus