Nearly every day, and often many times a day, farm-wagons drawn by two horses pass along the highway in front of my window. The wagon-bed is filled with sacks of wheat or piled high with yellow corn, and on the high spring-seat in front sits the farmer driving, and by him his wife, her head invariably wrapped in a white woollen nubia or a little shawl, worn as a protection against the catarrh-producing prairie winds. Cuddled in the hay at their feet, but keeping a bright lookout with round eager eyes, are two or three stout, rosy children, and often there is a baby in the mother's arms. When "paw" has sold his wheat or corn the whole family will walk around the Square several times, looking in at the shop-windows and staring at the people on the sidewalk. When they have decided in which store they can get the best bargains, they will go in and buy groceries, calico and flannel, shoes for the children, and perhaps a high chair for the baby. Later in the day they rattle by again, the farmer sitting alone on the spring-seat, the wife and children, as a better protection against the wind, on some hay in the now empty wagon-bed behind. So they jolt homeward over the rough, frozen road or toil through sticky mud, as the case may be, well pleased with their purchases and their glimpse of town, and content to take up again the round of monotonous life on their isolated prairie farm. Sometimes on spring-like days, when the roads are good, two women or a woman and one or two half-grown children drive by in a spring-wagon, bringing chickens, eggs, and butter to market. Heavy wagons loaded with large clear blocks of ice go by every day, the men walking and driving or seated on a board seat at the extreme rear of the wagon. The great crystal cubes look, as they flash in the sunshine, like building-material for Aladdin's palace quarried from some mine of jewels, but they are only brought from the Skunk River, three miles distant, to the ice-houses in town, and there packed away in sawdust for summer use. On two days of the week--shipping days for live-stock--farm-wagons with a high railing round the beds go by, and inside the railing, crowded as thickly as they can stand, are fat black or black-and-white hogs, which thrust their short noses between the boards and squeal to get out. They are unloaded at the cattle-pens near the railroad, and thence shipped to pork-packers at Chicago.