The rumble of a heavy wagon began to sound down the road; and when I could hear the splash of the horses’ hoofs near by, I was delighted to catch the call of the driver, as he asked me to a seat at his side. He was a farm-hand, young and muscular and slouching, as he sat stoop-shouldered, with the lines held loosely in his bare hands, while the rain dripped from a felt hat upon the shining surface of his rubber coat. Why he had asked me to ride I could not clearly see, for he scarcely turned his lacklustre eyes upon me when I climbed up beside him, and he seemed not in the least anxious to talk. We were driving through a region that was growing familiar from its changelessness. On every side were fields of corn, unfenced, and bounded only by the horizon, apparently, as they stretched away into cloudy space. Like islands in a sea of standing corn were widely scattered groups of farm buildings, their clusters of cottonwood-trees about them and sometimes a fruit orchard. And if there was any other break in the monotony of corn, it was where vast acres had been turned to raising beets for the sugar trade. Hardly a swell marred the level of the prairie, and the rails reached endlessly on in an unbending line across the plain. The usual subjects of conversation were of no avail with my new acquaintance. He was not interested in corn and only languidly in the experiment with beets, and the general election failed to move him, although he ventured so far as to insist that there was no hope for the farmers of the West until the free coinage of silver should be secured. His mood was in keeping with the day, and life was “flat, unprofitable, and stale.” He quickened finally, to the theme of work, but only as a vent to his depression. Work was plentiful enough; for such as he, life was little else than work, but of what profit was it to slave your soul out for enough to eat and to wear and a place to sleep? There was no escaping the tragedy of the man’s history as he told me simply of his father’s death from overwork in an attempt to pay off the mortgage on the farm and how his mother was left to the unequal struggle. He himself was eleven then, and the elder of two children; he could remember clearly how the home was lost—the accumulated labor of many years. From that time his life had been an unbroken struggle for existence, against odds of sickness that again and again had swept away his earnings and thrown him back to the dependence of an agricultural laborer.