The saddest sight Norman saw in this city was the great number of saloons, as they call the shops where liquor is sold, where drunkards are made, and where many an unwary victim is lured to destruction. In almost every block, they tempt the thoughtless; music sounds her welcome; vice puts on her most attractive mien; and young men forget a father’s counsel, a mother’s prayers; and for the momentary gratification of their appetites they offer up reputation, character, health, life, and their eternal all; a costly sacrifice! Everything lost, and nothing gained but degradation, misery, and death. CHAPTER V. ON THE ROCK RIVER. “These are the gardens of the desert; these, The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful, For which the speech of England has no name, The prairies.... Lo! they stretch In airy undulations far away, As if the ocean, in his gentlest swell, Stood still, with all his rounded billows, fix’d And motionless forever.”—BRYANT. A railway ride over the beautiful prairies took Norman and his mother to their place of destination. How soft and gentle were those prairie swells, looking like English park scenery, relieved as is the vast expanse of meadow by scattered groves of trees. The fine unbroken horizon line tells you that you do not see a greater extent of country, only because your eye has no greater capabilities; that onward, and all around, the vast prairie lies in its verdure and beauty; that there, as here, the flowers are springing; that you may travel north, south, east, and west, hundreds of miles, and still that undulating prairie, in its “encircling vastness,” will lie around you like the sea. At the station Norman found his uncle looking out anxiously for him, and he was soon pressed tenderly in his arms. “Well, my boy,” said his uncle, “I feared we should be disappointed again to-day. How glad I am to see you once more, though you have so grown I would not have known you.” “How is Aunt Ellen?” asked Norman. “Very well, she is waiting anxiously for you at home; she has been counting the days since you wrote you were coming.” “How well I remember,” said Norman, “when I was a little boy, how she let me whittle in her room, and how she brought me bread and butter with white sugar on it.” “That bread and butter and sugar made a deep impression on his mind,” said Mrs. Lester; “he has always connected the thought of it with his Aunt Ellen.” “And there is your Aunt Ellen at the gate looking for you,” said his uncle. Norman loved his uncle and aunt very much, and was very glad to be with them once more. He loved to sit by his uncle’s side and read to him, and tell him about his school, and about his cottage home, and about his little cousins, Bessie and Edith, with whom he spent so many pleasant summer days, rambling about the woods and among the rocks.