It was through such country as this that my way led me toward the Iowa border. I walked along the valley of the Minnesota by Le Sueur and St. Peter to Mankato, where I spent Sunday, and then, cutting over the ridge, I went by Lake Crystal to Garden City, and so through Vernon and Amboy to Winnebago and on to Blue Earth City. Not often on the march am I offered a lift, but now and again I am picked up and hurried over some miles of the road, and it was one of the best of these windfalls that befell me on this particular journey. I had left Amboy only a few miles behind, and the long, dusty road stretched far to the south in the direction of Winnebago, where I meant to spend the night. The day was clear and gratefully warm; in the meadows had just begun the metallic music of the mowers, and on the air was the first fragrance of new-mown hay. Soon I caught the sound of the rapid drum of horses’ hoofs behind me, and, turning, I saw a gentleman seated in a light open four-wheeler, driving a pair of Indian ponies at a spanking pace in my direction. He drew up beside me, and asked, pleasantly, whether I cared to ride. I lost no time in thanking him and in mounting to the seat at his side; in a moment more we were off at a ten-mile gait, and I was watching with delight the business-like movement of the ponies’ pace, with their backs so straight and level that each might almost have held a coin without dropping it. In the meantime Dr. Brooks (for so I shall call the gentleman, who was returning to Winnebago from a professional visit on the outskirts of his practice) was engaging me in conversation. We very naturally discussed the recent nominations and the issues of the coming general election, and then I had ample opportunity of learning much from him of actual local conditions. He seemed to me to be singularly well informed. He had travelled widely over the West, and this particular region he had known familiarly since its early settlement. Every farm-house which we passed he pointed out to me, telling me the farmer’s name meanwhile, and something of his history. There was a curious uniformity in the narrative. The life was rough enough in the beginning, no doubt, and of the essence of hard frontier struggle, but it sounded like a fairy tale as he told me of one man and another who had come out in the early days almost penniless from the East or the Middle West or, in some cases, from a foreign country, and had “squatted” on the soil; now these settlers had each a hundred and sixty acres under high cultivation and a good, substantial house and adequate barns and machinery and stock; they could secure money on easy terms at the local bank when they needed it, and the market value of their land had risen two hundred per cent and even higher in the past twenty-five years.