r, without one bitter thought of the wife and mother she might
have been; I would have painted her mother tender, (as she was,)
forgetting how pettish she grew on busy days: but what can I do? I
must show you men and women as they are in that especial State of the
Union where I live. In all the others, of course, it is very
different. Now, being prepared for disappointment, will you see my
hero?

He had sauntered out from the city for a morning walk,--not through the
hills, as Margret went, going home, but on the other side, to the
river, over which you could see the Prairie. We are in Indiana,
remember. The sunlight was pure that morning, powerful, tintless, the
true wine of life for body or spirit. Stephen Holmes knew that, being a
man of delicate animal instincts, and so used it, just as he had used
the dumb-bells in the morning. All things were made for man, weren't
they? He was leaning against the door of the school-house,--a red,
flaunting house, the daub on the landscape: but, having his back to it,
he could not see it, so through his half-shut eyes he suffered the
beauty of the scene to act on him. Suffered: in a man, according to
his creed, the will being dominant, and all influences, such as beauty,
pain, religion, permitted to act under orders. Of course.

It was a peculiar landscape,--like the man who looked at it, of a
thoroughly American type. A range of sharp, dark hills, with a sombre
depth of green shadow in the clefts, and on the sides massed forests of
scarlet and flame and crimson. Above, the sharp peaks of stone rose
into the wan blue, wan and pale themselves, and wearing a certain air
of fixed calm, the type of an eternal quiet. At the base of the hills
lay the city, a dirty mass of bricks and smoke and dust, and at its far
edge flowed the river,--deep here, tinted with green, writhing and
gurgling and curdling on the banks over shelving ledges of lichen and
mud-covered rock. Beyond it yawned the opening to the great West,--the
Prairies. Not the dreary deadness here, as farther west. A plain,
dark russet in hue,--for the grass was sun-scorched,--stretching away
into the vague distance, intolerable, silent, broken by hillocks and
puny streams that only made the vastness and silence more wide and
heavy. Its limitless torpor weighed on the brain; the eyes ached,
stretching to find some break before the dull russet faded into the
amber of the horizon and was lost. An American landscap