me at least that
every moment my friend's eye was on me, and he kept saying, "They're
wild, mind!" The next morning in the dark dawn we had them in harness,
and drove out, when the stars were scarce gone from the sky, due north
to the Bad Lands, to give me a new experience of the vast American land
that bore us both, and made us, despite the thousands of miles that
stretched between ocean and prairie, brothers in blood and
brain,--brothers and friends.

Yet how to tell that ride, now grown a shining leaf of my book of
memory! for my eyes were fascinated with the land, in the high blowing
August wind, full of coolness and upland strength, like new breath in my
nostrils; and forward over the broken country, fenceless, illimitable,
ran the brown road, like a ploughed ribbon of soil, into the distance,
where pioneer and explorer and prospector had gone before, and now the
farmer was thinly settling,--the new America growing up before my eyes!
and him only by me to make me not a stranger there, with talk of absent
friends and old times, though scarce the long age of a college course
had gone by,--talk lapsing as of old on such rides into serious strains,
problems such as the young talk of together and keep their secret,
learning life,--the troubles of the heart of youth. And if now I recur
to some of the themes we touched on, and set down these memoranda,
fragments of life, thinking they may be of use to other youths as they
were then to us, I trust they will lose no privacy; for, as I write, I
see them in that place, with that noble prospect, that high sky, and him
beside me whose young listening yet seems to woo them from my breast.

We mounted the five-mile ridge,--and, "Poor Robin," he said, "what of
him?" "Poor Robin sleeps in the Muses' graveyard," I laughed, "in the
soft gray ashes of my blazing hearth. One must live the life before he
tells the tale." "I loved his 'awakening,'" he replied, "and I have
often thought of it by myself. And will nothing come of him now?" "Who
can tell?" I said, looking hard off over the prairie. "The Muses must
care for their own. That 'awakening,'" I went on, after a moment of
wondering why the distant stream of the valley was called "the
Looking-glass," and learning only that such was its name, "was when
after the bookish torpor of his mind--you remember he called books his
opiates--he felt the beauty of the spring and the marvel of human
service come back on him like a flood. It was t