guest is as a son--and put on a full kettle of water. This also is
etiquette; it assumes that the family will not be up for some time. Had
it been near the breakfast hour, but half a kettle would have been
correct. Then he left the house, stick in hand, for a long walk. This
time he struck out in the direction of the open plains. The flimsy
little town was soon behind him, and the winding trail among the
sagebrush, went reaching out to the east. The pine woods of his native
country were not well stocked with life; the feathered folk were
inconspicuous there; but here it seemed that every bush and branch was
alive with singing birds. The vesper sparrows ran before his feet,
flashed their white tail feathers in a little flight ahead, or from the
top of a stone or a buffalo skull they rippled out their story of the
spring. The buffalo birds in black and white hung poised in the air to
tell their tale, their brown mates in the grass applauding with a rapt
attention. The flickers paused in harrying prairie anthills and
chuckling fled to the nearest sheltering trees. Prairie dogs barked from
their tiny craters; gophers chirruped or turned themselves into peg-like
watchtowers to observe the striding stranger.

But over all, the loud sweet prairie lark sang his warbling yodel-song
of the sun with a power and melody that no bird anywhere, in any land,
can equal. It seemed to Jim the very spirit of these level lands, the
embodiment of the awakening plains and wind, the moving voice of all the
West. And all about, as though responsive, the flowers of spring came
forth: purple avens in straggling patches; golden yellow bloom, with
blots and streaks of fluffy white; while here and there, as far as eye
could reach, was the blue-white tinge of the crocus flower, the queen of
the springtime flowers, the child of the sky and the snow.

The passionate youth in him responded to the beauty of it; he felt it
lay hold on him and he would have sung, but he found no words in all his
college-born songs to tell of this new joy. "I didn't know it _could_ be
so beautiful. I didn't know," he said again and again.

At the seven o'clock whistle of a mill he wheeled about toward the town,
and saw there, almost overhanging it, the mountain, bright in the
morning, streaked with white, lifting a rugged head through the
gray-green poncho of its cedar robe, a wondrous pile capped by the one
lone tower that watched, forever watched, above the vast expanse