rching orders came. The air was clear and fine, and the electric
lights of Minden shone from afar with the brilliance of stars.

From Minden, we came by way of Campbell to Red Cloud, where we had
luncheon at the Royal Hotel.

We had made this detour to Minden and Red Cloud in order to call upon a
friend who is enthusiastic over his fine ranch near Red Cloud. Galloway
cattle are his specialty, and he finds the rolling plains of southern
Nebraska a fine place to breed them. From Red Cloud we came on in the
afternoon through Blue Hill to Hastings, and through Hastings to
Fremont. We were en route for Lincoln, where we hoped to spend the
night. Between Minden and Red Cloud the country is very rolling, and
sweeps away from the eye in great undulations. High on some of these
ridges were fine silhouettes outlined against the sky: loaded wagons
bringing in the sheaves of grain; men standing high, feeding these
sheaves to the insatiable maw of the threshing machine; a boy standing
in the grain wagon as the thick yellow stream poured into it, leveling
the grain with a spade; all these and many other pictures of the Idyl of
Harvest. For two hundred miles of our run the smoke of the threshing
machines rose in the clear sky.

Sometimes the fields were covered with stacks of wheat looking like
great yellow bee-hives. Sometimes the wheat was in rounded mounds or
cocks. Surely we were seeing the bread of a nation on these vast
Nebraska plains.

Along the roadsides were quantities of "snow on the mountain," its
delicate grey-green leaves edged with a pure white border. Across the
fields the killdeer were flying, and calling in their shrill, clear
notes, which always seem to breathe of the sea. They were not out of
place, flying above these long billows of brown earth. The farmhouses
were marked by clumps of cottonwood trees, and as we moved Eastward a
few low evergreens began to appear.

Around Blue Hill the country is very fine, being a great plateau
stretching off into illimitable distances. As we climbed the hill to
the little town we met a farmer in his wagon who had just despatched a
bull snake, a thick, ugly-looking creature. We stopped to pass the time
of day, and he told us that he came to Nebraska from Illinois in '79 in
a covered wagon. He was enthusiastic over Nebraska.

We made another stop to watch at close range the operations of a
threshing machine. It was a fine sight. Two yellow streams came from the
spouts of th