It is difficult to pass thus lightly over wide stretches of the journey. Under every casual sentence is a mine of what proved valuable experience to me: The days in the Steel Works, for example, as a member of a gang of foreign laborers and associated with an army of skilled and disciplined workmen, meeting some of them on familiar terms at the boarding-house and at the club, which is an interesting experiment on the part of the company. Then a tramp along the Illinois River through a rich country which teemed with vegetation in the luxuriance of the tropics; and a day’s march on the railway with a veritable hobo who had lost his partner and cheerfully took up with me, and who proved to be a delightful fellow, by no means lost to manliness, from whom I parted most regretfully when a job was found for him in a brick-kiln near Ottawa. Then the Convention itself, with its vast array of party organization, and its highly dramatic incidents as affecting the careers of political leaders, and its strong undercurrents of personal and sectional ambition, and the interesting personages, and picturesque figures; all so intensely real and finely typical and keenly alive with national spirit, and splendidly representative of wide, heterogeneous empire bound together in marvellous union. And then a few days spent near Belle Plain, where, driven by the rain from the road, I found shelter in a farm-house shed and was eagerly seized upon by the farmer as a hired man, until one morning, when, as usual, I had risen at sunrise and had cleaned the stables and curried the horses and was milking the old white cow, the longing for the tramp laid sudden hold of me and soon after breakfast my eager feet were again on the main-travelled road. The storm had passed, the sun was shining from a cloudless sky, and a strong, cool wind was tossing the graceful branches of a cluster of American elms at the roadside as I left the farm, and was blowing through the dewy, dark recesses of a bit of fragrant woodland as I climbed the hill, giving the sense of infinite vitality; when I reached the summit there lay below me, embedded in deep green, one of the hundred exquisite lakes of southern Minnesota, with its rippling surface joyously dancing in the sunlight and adding a touch of magic beauty to the rich, undulating landscape of varying field and forest and deep meadow-land. All about me were the homes of original settlers, where yet live some of the very men and women who, only a generation ago, began to reclaim this paradise from a boundless waste of treeless prairie. Looking out upon it now from such a height, seeing its dense woodlands, the fields rank with standing grain, the farm-houses gleaming white in the sun, the blue sheets of living water, and the distant Minnesota threading its way by towns and villages along fertile banks, one could but dream of its future, when the crudeness will be gone, and close culture will have made it all a very garden of the Lord!