and cabins of hewed logs chinked with mud are still to be seen here and there--specimens of the early homes. In the regions where turf houses were necessary prairie-hay was burned as fuel. When his family was housed from the weather the farmer turned his attention to his land. The virgin sod had to be broken and the rich black soil turned up in ridges to the air and sunlight. When the ground was prepared the stock of seed-corn was planted or wheat sown, and the farmer's old life began again under new and quite different circumstances. In the eastern and oldest-settled part of the State these beginnings date back a generation: in the western part they are still fresh and recent. In the old part well-cultivated fields, large barns, orchards, gardens and comfortable farm-houses greet the traveller's eye: in the new he may travel for half a day without seeing a single dwelling, and may consider himself fortunate if he does not have to pass the night under the lee side of a haystack. After a foothold has been gained in a new country and a home established, a generation, perhaps two, must pass away before a fine type of humanity is produced. The fathers and mothers have toiled for the actual necessaries of life, and gained them. The children are supplied with physical comforts. Plenty of food and exercise in the pure air give them stalwart frames, good blood and perfect animal health, but there is a bovine stolidity of expression in their faces, a suggestion of kinship with the clod. They are honest-hearted and well-meaning--stupid, not naturally, but because their minds have never been quickened and stimulated. They grope in a blind way for better things, and wonder if life means no more than to plough and sow and reap, to wash and cook and sew. I see young people of this class by the score, and my heart goes out toward them in pity, though they are all unconscious of needing pity. Perhaps one out of every hundred will break from the slowly-stepping ranks and run ahead to taste of the springs of knowledge reserved for the next generation, but the vast majority will go down to their graves without ever attaining to the ripeness and symmetry of a fully-developed life. Their children perhaps--certainly their grand-children--will attain a fine physical and mental type; and by that time "the prairies" will cease to be a synonym for lack of society and remoteness from liberal and refining influences.