It was a calm, glimmering September day. Prairie Island rose with red and yellow and crisping leaves, like a royal tent amid a dead sea of flowers. The prairie grass was dry, though still mingled with a green undergrowth. Prairie chickens were everywhere, quails, and plover. At midday a billowy cloud of smoke began to wall the eastern horizon, and it slowly rolled forward, driven by the current of the air. "O-o-oh!" said one of the scholars! "Look! look! What the man said is true--the prairie _is_ on fire!" Jasper went to the door. The blue sky had turned to an ashy hue, and the sun was a dull red. An unnatural wind had arisen like a draft of air. "Teacher, can we go out and look?" asked several voices. "Yes," said Jasper, "the school may take a recess." The pupils went to the verge of the trees, and watched the billowy columns of smoke in the distance. The world seemed to change. The air filled with flocks of frightened birds. The sky became veiled, and the sun was as red as blood. Since the great snow of 1830 but few buffaloes had been seen on the prairie. But a dark cloud of flesh came bounding over the prairie grass, bellowing, with low heads and erect tails. The children thought that they were cattle at first, but they were buffaloes. They rushed toward the trees of Prairie Island, turned, and looked behind. Then the leader pawed the earth, and the herd rushed on toward the north. The fire spread in a semicircle, and seemed to create a wind which impelled it on with resistless fury. "O-o-oh, look! look!" exclaimed another scholar. "See the horses and the cattle--droves of them! Look at the sky--see the birds!" There were droves of cattle hurrying in every direction. The men in the fields near Prairie Island came hurrying home. "The prairie is on fire!" said each one, not knowing what else to say. "Will it reach us?" asked Jasper of the harvesters. "What is to hinder it? The wind is driving it this way. It has formed a wall of fire that almost surrounds us." "What can we do?" asked Jasper. The harvesters considered. "We are safer here than elsewhere, let what will come," said one. "If the fire sweeps the prairie, it would overtake us before we could get to any great river, and the small creeks are dry." The afternoon grew darker and darker. The sun went out; under the black smoke rolled a red sea whose waves grew nearer and nearer. The children began to cry and the women to pray. An old man came hobbling out to the arch of the trees. "I foretold it," said he. "The world is on fire. The Day of Judgment has come! A time and times time, and a half." He had been a Millerite. "It will be here in an hour," said a harvester. But there arose a counter-wind. The wall of fire seemed to be stayed. The smoke columns rose to the heavens like Babel towers. Afar, families were seen fleeing on horseback toward the bed of a creek which they hoped to find flowing, but which had run dry.