A new external life had indeed opened upon this child of luxury and conventional refinement. He whose movements had been chronicled as matter of interest to the public, for whose presence the "world" had postponed its fetes, might now travel hundreds of miles without observation or inquiry. He upon whose steps had waited a crowd of obsequious attendants, now found himself with one follower, whose tone of independence hardly permitted him to call him servant. In cities, where he would still have been surrounded by those conventional distinctions of which he had himself been deprived, the sense of a great loss would have been ever present with him, and the contrast with the past would have made the fairest present to which he could now attain, desolate. But there could be no comparison, and therefore no painful contrast, between the wild life of the prairies and the ultra-civilization of English aristocratic society. In the excitement and adventure of the one, he hoped to forget the other. He sought to forget--not to be resigned, to acquiesce. His inner life was unchanged. He had been a dreamer--a pleasure-seeker--and a dreamer and pleasure-seeker he continued, though the dreams and the pleasures must be wrought from new materials. To sketch the progress of such a character through the shifting scenes of his new existence--to observe him in his association with the strong, daring, acute, but uncultivated denizens of our frontier States--to stand with sympathizing heart beside him as he first entered upon those unpeopled solitudes in whose silence God speaks to the soul, is not permitted us at present. This may be the work of another day; but now we must pass at once with him from Boston to a scene within the confines of Iowa. His carriage had been left behind, and for two days he had been riding over a rolling country, whose grassy knolls, dotted here and there with clumps of trees, brought occasionally to his mind the park scenery of his own land. Early in this day he had passed a farm with a comfortable house and substantial out-buildings, but no dwelling of man had since presented itself to him, though the sun was now low in the western sky. Under ordinary circumstances this would have been of little consequence, for he had already spent more than one night in the open air without discomfort; but his attendant had heard a distant muttering of thunder, and John Stacy was not the lad to encounter without murmuring a night of storm unsheltered. John's anxiety made him keen-sighted, and he was the first to perceive and announce the approach of a rider. We use the neutral term _rider_ not without consideration, for he was one in whom a certain ease of manner, and even an air of command, contradicted the testimony of habiliments made and worn after a fashion recognized nowhere as characteristic of the _genus_ gentleman. A courteous inquiry from Horace Danforth respecting the nearest place at which a night's shelter might