It was a tiny one-room affair, built of sods piled up like bricks, with a roof made of poles covered with sods and wild hay; it boasted a wooden floor. There were a stove, a table, three chairs and a small cot. In these days there would be a phonograph and a collection of the latest music, but this herder’s only constant companions were a dog and a canary bird. For fuel there was a small pile of cottonwood sticks, a box of buffalo chips, and a barrel containing bunches of wild hay tied into knots. Two other men were there, also driven in by the blizzard. I shall always feel that the mental picture revealed to me by the contrast between those two men in that lonely hut had the greatest deciding influence in helping me to fit myself for the life of the silent world. They were both white-haired old men, though full of vigor. One I recognized as the cattle king of Northern Colorado. His cattle were everywhere; he owned half a town and an army ran at his beck and call, yet he could barely write his own name. It was said he always signed his checks “Z,” because he could not be sure of spelling “Zachariah” properly. He had no poetry or imagination, except what he could drink out of a jug. In the old days, when the plains were ruled by brute force, this man was happy, for life becomes tolerable only as we can equal our friends in manners and education. But how the plains had changed! Schools, churches, music, culture, were working in with the towns—the leaven which was to change the soggy biscuit of the old life to the “riz bread” of the new. That strange, fateful, overmastering thing we call education was separating the people of the new prairie towns into classes more distinct than money and material power had ever been able to create. This old man had railed and cursed at the change, for a premonition of what was to come had entered his heart, and something told him that his blunt philosophy of life was all wrong. In this country a man may climb from poverty up to wealth, or he may leave wealth to others, but it is not possible for him to climb in the same way up into education, and he cannot leave these benefits to those who follow him. The old man had begun to fear that he had climbed the wrong ladder. There he sat, bitter and hateful, chained to prejudice, the slave of ignorance. He had no companion to share his narrow prison except his money—the most useless and irritating single companion that any man can have for the harvest years. His companion was about the same age, an educated man, a “lunger,” forced to spend the rest of his life in these dry plains. I had seen him before at the county convention, where there had been talk of nominating him for county clerk—a much-desired political job. He might have been nominated but for his own actions. He stood straight up in the convention and said: