For a long time I lay comfortably in my berth, gazing out at the appalling spread of land and sky. Even at sea the great bowl of the sky had never looked so vast to me. The land was nothing to it. In the foreground there was nothing; in the middle distance, nothing; in the distance, nothing--nothing, nothing, nothing, met the eye in all that treeless waste of brown and gray which lay between the railroad line and the horizon, on which was discernible the faint outlines of several ships--ships which were in reality a house, a windmill and a barn. Presently our craft--for I had the feeling that I was on a ship at anchor--got under way. On we sailed over the ocean of land for mile upon mile, each mile like the one before it and the one that followed, save only when we passed a little fleet of houses, like fishing boats at sea, or crossed an inconsequential wagon road, resembling the faintly discernible wake of some ship, long since out of sight. Presently I arose and joining my companion, went to the dining car for breakfast. He too had fallen under the spell of the prairies. We sat over our meal and stared out of the window like a pair of images. After breakfast it was the same: we returned to our car and continued to gaze out at the eternal spaces. Later in the morning, we became restless and moved back to the observation car as men are driven by boredom from one room to another on an ocean liner. Now and then in the distance we would see cattle like dots upon the plain, and once in a long time a horseman ambling along beneath the sky. The little towns were far apart and had, like the surrounding scenery, an air of sadness and of desolation. The few buildings were of primitive form, most of them one-story structures of wood, painted in raw color. But each little settlement had its wooden church, and each church its steeple--a steeple crude and pathetic in its expression of effort on the part of a poor little hamlet to embellish, more than any other house, the house of God. Even our train seemed to have been affected by this country. The observation car was deserted when we reached it. Presently, however, a stranger joined us there, and after a time we fell into conversation with him as we sat and looked at the receding track. He proved to be a Kansan and he told us interesting things about the State.