Women have seldom sufficient serious employment to silence their feelings: a round of little cares, or vain pursuits, frittering away all strength of mind and organs, they become naturally only objects of sense. MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT You have too much respect upon the world: They lose it that do buy it with much care. SHAKESPEARE TWO NEIGHBORS OF ST. LOUIS The Big Muddy built the fertile regions near its course. Dropping in warm low tides mellow soil gathered from upper lands, it pushed the flood of the sea farther and farther to the south. Non palma sine pulvere has been the song of its waters--no green will grow here without my mould. It was at its wonder-work those millions of suns ago when the tiny three-toed horse browsed among the grasses of what is now Kansas. Its great years can be measured only by the dial of God. All the monstrosities of the eld of its birth it has survived, and like a knowing, sentient thing--a thinking, feeling thing--it has been expanding and contracting, doubling up and straightening out its tawny body, each one of its numberless centuries pushing its uncounted mouths farther toward the submerged mountains of the Antilles. In its thaumaturgy it formed vast prairies and rolling lands. Upon its gently-packed earth forests shot up. Subterranean streams jetted limpid springs, which joined and grew to rivers open to the light of day. Above the heavens were broad and the horizon far away--as far as you outlook at sea when sky and earth melt to a gray, and you stand wondering where the bar of heaven begins and where the restless waters below. Indians, autochthons, or, perchance, wanderers from Iberia, or Babylon, were here. Then white men came to the flat brown lands, and that they brought wives showed they meant to stay and build a commonwealth. The two raised hearthstones for their family, and barns for herds and flocks. They marked off fields and knotted them with fruit trees, and blanketed them with growing wheat, and embossed them in days of ripeness with haystacks such as the race of giants long since foregone might have built. In their rich cornfields they set up shocks which leaned wearily with their weight of golden kernels, or stood torn and troubled by cattle nosing for the sugary pulp. Such works their heaven saw and to-day sees, their air above entirely bright, beading and sparkling in its inverted cup through every moment of sunshine. Over this land and its constant people icy northers, victorious in elemental conflicts far above the Rockies, rush swirling and sweeping. They snap tense, sapless branches and roll dried leaves and other ghosts of dead summer before their force. They pile their snows in the angles of the rail fence and upon the southern banks of ravines, and whistle for warmth through the key-holes and under the shrunken doors of farm-houses.