Among the Corn-Rows "But the road sometimes passes a rich meadow, where the songs of larks and bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled." I Rob held up his hands, from which the dough depended in ragged strings. "Biscuits," he said, with an elaborate working of his jaws, intended to convey the idea that they were going to be specially delicious. Seagraves laughed, but did not enter the shanty door. "How do you like baching it?" "Oh, don't mention it!" entreated Rob, mauling the dough again. "Come in an' sit down. What in thunder y' standin' out there for?" "Oh, I'd rather be where I can see the prairie. Great weather!" "Im-mense!" "How goes breaking?" "Tip-top! A leette dry now; but the bulls pull the plough through two acres a day. How's things in Boomtown?" "Oh, same old grind." "Judge still lyin'?" "Still at it." "Major Mullens still swearin' to it?" "You hit it like a mallet. Railroad schemes are thicker 'n prairie-chickens. You've got grit, Rob. I don't have anything but crackers and sardines over to my shanty, and here you are making soda-biscuit." "I have t' do it. Couldn't break if I didn't. You editors c'n take things easy, lay around on the prairie, and watch the plovers and medderlarks; but we settlers have got to work." Leaving Rob to sputter over his cooking, Seagraves took his slow way off down toward the oxen grazing in a little hollow. The scene was characteristically, wonderfully beautiful. It was about five o'clock in a day in late June, and the level plain was green and yellow, and infinite in reach as a sea; the lowering sun was casting over its distant swells a faint impalpable mist, through which the breaking teams on the neighboring claims ploughed noiselessly, as figures in a dream. The whistle of gophers, the faint, wailing, fluttering cry of the falling plover, the whir of the swift-winged prairie-pigeon, or the quack of a lonely duck, came through the shimmering air. The lark's infrequent whistle, piercingly sweet, broke from the longer grass in the swales nearby. No other climate, sky, plain, could produce the same unnamable weird charm. No tree to wave, no grass to rustle, scarcely a sound of domestic life; only the faint melancholy soughing of the wind in the short grass, and the voices of the wild things of the prairie. Seagraves, an impressionable young man (junior editor of the Boomtown Spike), threw himself down on the sod, pulled his hat-rim down over his eyes, and looked away over the plain. It was the second year of Boomtown's existence, and Seagraves had not yet grown restless under its monotony. Around him the gophers played saucily. Teams were moving here and there across the sod, with a peculiar noiseless, effortless motion, that made them seem as calm, lazy, and insubstantial as the mist through which they made their way; even the sound of passing wagons seemed a sort of low, well-fed, self-satisfied chuckle.