in two
miles above me, and after it had dug itself down so as to get water in
which to float, it worked its way down to the river eight miles away.
The line of this ditch is now marked by a fringe of trees; but in 1855,
nothing broke the surface of the sea of grass except a few clumps of
plum trees and willows at the foot of the opposite slope, and here and
there along the line of the present ditch, there were ponds of open
water, patches of cattails, and the tent-like roofs of muskrat-houses. I
had learned enough of the prairies to see that this would be a miry
place to cross, if a crossing had to be made; so I waited for Henderson
L. to come up and tell me how to steer my course.

"This is Hell Slew," said he as he came up. "But I guess we won't have
to cross. Le's see; le's see! Yes, here we are."

He looked at his memorandum of the description of my land, looked about
him, drove off a mile south and came back, finally put his horse down
the hill to the base of it, and out a hundred yards in the waving grass
that made early hay for the town for fifteen years, he found the corner
stake driven by the government surveyors, and beckoned for me to
come down.

"This is the southeast corner of your land," said he. "Looks like a
mighty good place for a man with as good a shotgun as that--ducks and
geese the year round!"

"Where are the other corners?" I asked.

"That's to be determined," he answered.

To determine it, he tied his handkerchief about the felly of his buggy
wheel, held a pocket compass in his left hand to drive by, picked out a
tall rosin-weed to mark the course for me, and counted the times the
handkerchief went round as the buggy traveled on. He knew how many turns
made a mile. The horse's hoofs sucked in the wet sod as we got farther
out into the marsh, and then the ground rose a little and we went up
over a headland that juts out into the marsh; then we went down into the
slew again, and finally stopped in a miry place where there was a
flowing spring with tall yellow lady's-slippers and catkined willows
growing around it. After a few minutes of looking about, Burns found my
southwest corner. We made back to the edge of the slope, and Henderson
L. looked off to the north in despair.

"My boy," said he, "I've actually located your two south corners, and
you can run the south line yourself from these stakes. The north line is
three hundred and twenty rods north of and parallel to it--and the east
and