Fessenden drew his leg over his horse’s neck and looked idly about him. The sun was directly overhead; he had forgotten his compass, and, apparently, he was lost in the very middle of the great plain of Hungary. But he had been lost many times before, and in far worse places than this green and smiling expanse; so flat and lying in an atmosphere of such clarity he could well believe the gentle Magyar boast that with the naked eye a man could be distinguished from a beast at a distance of fifteen miles. There appeared to be nothing whatever on the horizon; but an occasional small farm dotted the prairie, and here and there he saw a goose girl with her little flock, a shepherd in his native costume: a long white coat of spun wool, with panels of black embroidered at the edges; a garment as immaculate as if just from the loom, and swung carelessly about the shoulders, the sleeves evidently designed for ornament alone. The little goose girls might have stood for a study in lonely childhood; as Fessenden turned his head one was the solitary figure in the vast expanse behind him; but when he passed her she had nodded brightly and seemed quite content with her lot. It was not his first visit to Hungary; he had voyaged on the Danube and the Theiss in his canoe, and had climbed Retyezat to the lake of Zenoga, making his way thence into Roumania. He knew something of the language and much of the hospitality of the amiable peasant people, and could recall no other country in whose wilderness he would rather be lost. Moreover, the great plains of Hungary reminded him of the wild reaches of his own country. They were green and smiling, indescribably friendly and gentle of aspect, in spite of the barbarous hordes, the fierce battles that had ravaged them, the blood that had soaked their soil; and the American deserts, without history of consequence, scowled eternally at the sun that devoured them, and gave no hospitality to man. But both represented Nature in one of her abrupt desires to emulate the plains of Space; both gave man a sense of personal freedom, of disseverance from the complications of life. And the great Alfold had long since suggested to the practical mind of Fessenden what could be done with the Western deserts; in the last five years he had reclaimed the largest of them by means of a complicated system of irrigation, and encouragement of immigration from the Eastern States. One of his dreams was to make the United States fertile and productive from end to end, if only to relieve the congestion in the great centres and give the plain people of his country the happiness they constantly, with reason or without, demanded as their birthright. But he had sighed humorously more than once as he reflected that to compass all his plans would require at least two more lifetimes than Nature had placed at the disposal of any man.