Monday’s march took me from a point not far west of Jefferson, by way of Coon Rapids, to the heart of the hills in the neighborhood of Templeton, where I spent the night on the farm of a Scotsman of the name of Hardy. The heat of the day was prodigious. Not like the languid heat of the tropics, it was as though the earth burned with fever which communicated itself in a nervous quiver to the hot, dry air, and quickened one’s steps along the baking roads. The stillness was almost appalling, and, as I passed great fields of standing corn, I could fancy that I heard it grow with a crackle as of visible outbudding of the blades. I did not walk all the way. Twice in the day I had a lift, both of several miles, and each with a farmer whose views differed as widely from the other’s as though they were separated by a thousand miles, instead of being relatively next-door neighbors. The first lift came in the morning along a main-travelled road which I took in the hope of meeting an intersecting one that would lead me on to Manning. A good-looking young farmer, fair-haired and blue-eyed, asked me to the seat at his side high above the box of a farm wagon. We were not long in learning that both were interested in the economics of farming, where he knew much and I little, and where I was glad to be a listener. It was like talking again with a socialist from a sweatshop in Chicago. The fire of a new religion was in him. The difference lay chiefly in that his was not the gospel of society made new and good by doing away with private property and substituting a collective holding of all the land and capital that are made use of for production; his gospel was that of “free silver,” but he held it with a like unshaken faith in its regenerating power. For months he had been preaching it, and organizing night classes among the farmers in all the district schoolhouses within reach, for the purpose of study of the money question. Just once in the talk with me he grew convincing. There was much of the usual insistence of “a conspiracy among rich men against the producing classes,” whatever that may mean, and there were significant statements to the effect that nine-tenths of the farmers of the region, which he proudly called “The Garden of Eden of the West,” were under mortgage to moneylenders, and that farmers in general, owing to the tyranny of “the money power,” were fast sinking to a condition of “vassalage;” but at last he rose to something more intelligible. It was the sting of a taunt that roused him. He had seen copied from an Eastern newspaper the statement that Western farmers were beginning to want free silver, because they grasped at a chance to pay their debts at fifty cents on the dollar. The man was fine in his resentment of the charge of dishonor.