The morning of our journey was as fair as a July morning could be. Near the western horizon a few pearl-colored clouds hung motionless, as though the wind had been withdrawn to other skies. There was always that mysterious blue haze over the higher ridges and that soft light that fills the atmosphere and creates the sense of lovely "unimaginable spaces." It overhung the far rolling landscape of wheat fields, pastures and wood, crowning with a soft radiance the remoter low swelling hilltops and deepened into dreamy half shadows on their western slopes. Nearer, it fell on the rich gold of ripening wheat that lay in the valley or gleamed like golden crowns on the level space at the very summits of high hills; nearer still it touched with spring-like brilliancy the level green of meadows that clothed other uplands, where groups of Jersey cattle grazed beneath the shade of graceful elms; yet nearer it caught the rich foliage of blossoming chestnut trees and lit them up like crowns of ermine. In the immediate foreground it fell on the road that made continual windings along the edge of a steep ravine. How we rejoiced at the prospect and the warm, glowing sunshine! Right at the road's edge grew Christmas lady, sensitive and woodsia ferns, mealy-bell-wort, true and false Solomon's Seal, ground ginger, greenbrier, smilax and flaming cardinal flowers which were lit up with flying gleams of sunshine, forming great masses of tremulous shifting mosaic of rarer and older designs than any that Persia or India yet know. This Ohio of ours is indeed a fair land; and this morning, of all mornings of our lives, we seemed to hear "the ever-lasting poetry of the race." We thanked our lucky stars that our lot fell in such a pleasant place, and were justly proud that from Ohio's farms have come so many worthy souls. We found enough to admire in every farmhouse, however humble, to repay us for our climb. Now and then we saw some narrow valleys and rough hillsides, where corn and potatoes were engaged in a struggle with countless stones. Without the aid of the energetic Ohio farmers they had well-nigh been driven from the field. The rows of pale thin corn (the stunted reward of necessitous husbandry) "showed that these people possess that spirit of labor, which, however undervalued by some unthinking mortals, is the germ from which all good mast spring." One cannot but notice with what patient industry these sturdy sons of the soil turn these rocky hillsides into fields of growing grain; how the apple trees were made to acquire health and productiveness; and how the wheat stood like vast billows of gold under the rays of the forenoon sun. We soon forgot their seeming hardships and gave our hearty admiration to the sturdy reapers of Ohio.