uld see even at that distance
her skirts blown out by the brisk prairie wind. She came over the hill
as if running, and at its summit she appeared to stop as if looking for
something afar off. At that distance I could not tell whether she gazed
backward, forward, to the left or the right, but it impressed me that
she stood gazing backward over the route to the west along which she had
come. Then, it was plain, she began running down the gentle declivity
toward me, and once she fell and either lay or sat on the ground for
some time. Presently, though, she got up, and began coming on more
slowly, sometimes as if running, most of the time going from side to
side of the road as if staggering--and finally she went out of my sight,
dropping into a wide valley, to the bottom of which I could not see. It
was strange, as it appeared to me; this lone woman, the prairie, night,
and the sense of trouble; but, I thought, like most queer things, it
would have some quite simple explanation if one could see it close-by.

I made camp a few hundred yards from the road by a creek, along the
banks of which grew many willows, and some little groves of box-elders
and popples, which latter in this favorable locality grew eight or ten
feet tall, and were already breaking out their soft greenish catkins and
tender, quivering, pointed leaves: in one of these clumps I hid my
wagon, and in the midst of it I kindled my camp-fire. It seemed already
a little odd to find myself where I could not look out afar over
the prairie.

The little creek ran bank-full, but clear, and not muddy as our streams
now always are after a rain. One of the losses of Iowa through
civilization has been the disappearance of our lovely little brooks.
Then every few miles there ran a rivulet as clear as crystal, its bottom
checkered at the riffles into a brilliant pattern like plaid delaine by
the shining of the clean red, white and yellow granite pebbles through
the crossed ripples from the banks. Now these watercourses are robbed of
their flow by the absorption of the rich plowed fields, are all silted
up, and in summer are dry; and in spring and fall they are muddy
bankless wrinkles in the fields, poached full by the hoofs of cattle and
the snouts of hogs; and through many a swale, you would now be surprised
to know, in 1855 there ran a brook two feet wide in a thousand little
loops, with beautiful dark quiet pools at the turns, some of them
mantled with white water-lili