It was the time of harvest, and Norman loved to watch the mowing machine as it so rapidly cut down the tall grass, and the hay-making, and the tossing it into the great hay-stack. But what most interested him was to watch the progress of the great header, with its three attendant wagons, as it loomed up so grandly in the harvest field. Three horses urged onward the machine, which cut off the heads of the wheat and threw it on a platform, whence it was taken up in an elevator and received into a wagon, which accompanied the gigantic machine till it was loaded, and then, giving place to another, drove to the great stack with its burden. This machine requires three attendant wagons and six men, who thus cut down as much wheat as fifteen men can do in the ordinary way, and stack it to boot. These mowing and reaping machines seem especially intended for the extensive level grain fields of Illinois, which would look in vain for reapers and mowers with the old sickle and scythe. Something is lost however in picturesque effect, as was most manifest in the field next to that which the great header was so rapidly despoiling of its riches. This field was dotted over with the graceful sheaves of wheat, while a number of men were engaged in the work of binding and stacking them together. Norman had watched too the ploughman, who, with a cultivator passing between the shining corn, did the work more laboriously done at the East by hoeing. He liked to watch the herds of cattle and sheep feeding on the prairies; great herds, for everything was on a great scale on these western farms. But better even than this were the stories his cousin Justin told him about his boyish days. He was twenty-three years old, and he had lived on the prairie sixteen years. It used to be the custom, he said, to plant a flagstaff in some central position, and invite horsemen to leave the groves all around and ride to this point at a certain hour. As the hour approached horsemen would be seen issuing from all the groves, riding rapidly onward, driving before them wolves, and the timid deer, till a dense ring of three or four hundred horsemen inclosing the frightened animals who were then dispatched by the clubs with which the men were armed. Sometimes the desperate wolves broke through the ring where it was weakest, and then there was waving of hats, and cheering, and galloping after the animals, and all was wild uproar. “I can remember” said he “the charm these wolf-hunts had for me when I was a boy of twelve; how I armed myself with my club, mounted my spirited horse, and galloped off to the stirring scene.”