. All the way to
Clinton the country is attractive. After luncheon at the pleasant town
of Clinton, we cross the broad Mississippi, looking up and down its
green shores with delight. We are in Illinois now, and find Sterling and
Dixon attractive towns on the Rock River, a stream dotted with green
islands. The country is very open, with long stretches of prairie, green
with standing corn or red-yellow with shocks of oats. We spend the night
in De Kalb at a funny old hotel, built, they tell us, by Mr. Glidden,
the "barbed-wire king." The hotel is called "The Glidden." Its ceilings
are twenty feet high and we feel ourselves to be in "a banquet hall
deserted." From De Kalb we make a short detour into Chicago, returning
to the Highway at Joliet.

Joliet is a smoky city, full of factories and busy with the world's
work. It is late afternoon when we reach Joliet, and we drive on to
Elkhart, where we put up at a beautiful hotel with every modern
convenience. The Indiana roads are in excellent condition and take us
through a lovely rolling country of oaks and beech forests, and of
fields of grain breathing pastoral peace and prosperity.

All along through the Middle West we have been pleased to see the
immense interest taken in the Lincoln Highway. Everywhere one sees the
Lincoln Highway signs used in abundance on the streets through which the
Highway passes. The telephone poles, the garages, and sometimes the
shops, all are marked with the familiar red, white, and blue. They tell
us of a Western town whose citizens were so anxious to have their town
on the Highway that they of their own responsibility painted red, white,
and blue signs on the telephone poles leading into and through the
town. Later they were reluctantly obliged to paint out these signs, as
the Highway was not taken through their town.

The names of the farms in the Middle West are many of them very
interesting; as "Rolling Prairie Farm," "Round Prairie Farm," "Burr Oak
Valley Farm," "Hickory Grove Farm," and "Hill Brook Farm."

At the entrance to a farm in Illinois a farmer has nailed a shelf to a
telephone pole near his gate, and on this shelf he has placed a small
bust of Lincoln. I fancy this is a prophecy of many monuments that we
shall see along the Lincoln Highway in days to come.

We come into Ohio through the pleasant town of Van Wert, and drive on
through fields of corn and wheat to Lima; and here we leave the Lincoln
Highway for the present. We a