ame-like flower I was taught afterwards, by an Indian girl, to
call "Wickapee"; and she told me, too, that its splendors had a useful
side, for it was used by the Indians as a remedy for an illness to
which they were subject.

Beside these brilliant flowers, which gemmed and gilt the grass in a
sunny afternoon's drive near the blue lake, between the low oak-wood
and the narrow beach, stimulated, whether sensuously by the optic
nerve, unused to so much gold and crimson with such tender green, or
symbolically through some meaning dimly seen in the flowers, I enjoyed
a sort of fairy-land exultation never felt before, and the first drive
amid the flowers gave me anticipation of the beauty of the prairies.

At first, the prairie seemed to speak of the very desolation of
dulness. After sweeping over the vast monotony of the lakes to come to
this monotony of land, with all around a limitless horizon,--to walk,
and walk, and run, but never climb, oh! it was too dreary for any but
a Hollander to bear. How the eye greeted the approach of a sail, or
the smoke of a steamboat; it seemed that anything so animated must
come from a better land, where mountains gave religion to the scene.

The only thing I liked at first to do was to trace with slow and
unexpecting step the narrow margin of the lake. Sometimes a heavy
swell gave it expression; at others, only its varied coloring, which
I found more admirable every day, and which gave it an air of mirage
instead of the vastness of ocean. Then there was a grandeur in the
feeling that I might continue that walk, if I had any seven-leagued
mode of conveyance to save fatigue, for hundreds of miles without an
obstacle and without a change.

But after I had ridden out, and seen the flowers, and observed the
sun set with that calmness seen only in the prairies, and tire cattle
winding slowly to their homes in the "island groves,"--most peaceful
of sights,--I began to love, because I began to know tire scene, and
shrank no longer from "the encircling vastness."

It is always thus with the new form of life; we must learn to look
at it by its own standard. At first, no doubt, my accustomed eye kept
saying, if the mind did not, What! no distant mountains? What! no
valleys? But after a while I would ascend the roof of the house where
we lived, and pass many hours, needing no sight but the moon reigning
in the heavens, or starlight falling upon the lake, till all the
lights were out in the islan