“My cousin Walter,” continued Justin, “liked to hunt the wolf alone. One day he encountered a prairie wolf, whom he pursued till the wolf plunged into the stream to escape him. Seizing him by the tail, he cut the strings of his hind legs, during which operation the wolf bit his foot, leaving the mark of his long teeth through his boot. The disabled wolf, however, as it emerged from the water, made but slow progress, and Walter, disengaging his stirrups, gave him a blow in the forehead which killed him, and stripping off his skin, he returned home with his trophy, afterward to do good service in the form of a muff for his sister.” Then he told of the prairie fires that came every year. To be prepared for the approach of this fiery invader they ploughed several furrows near the fence of their farm, and then several furrows at the distance of about four rods, and to the grass on that interval they set fire, that this bared strip might oppose a barrier to the flames. Onward they would come when the wind was from the same quarter, with the speed of a locomotive, crackling, flashing, leaping high in the air, rolling great waves of lurid light onward with fierce rapidity. They would watch the on-coming of this sheeted flame, terrible in its fiery glare, crimsoning the heavens with its ruddy glow, consuming everything in its path, sending up fiery messengers into the sky, and wonder whether it would be possible for them to escape. “It was a magnificent sight,” continued he; “never do I expect to see anything so terrible in its sublimity and beauty. Now that the prairies are covered over with the habitations of men, we have no more prairie fires, and no more wolf hunts. No more fierce pursuer did the prairie wolf find than this untiring adversary of flame, driving before it the terrified wolves and the gentle deer, flying for life till they reached some timber where the fire would be arrested.” Norman was very sorry when the day came for him to leave. He was sorry to leave his aunts and cousins, to whom he had become very much attached; he was sorry to leave his colt, and to give up his pleasant rides on horseback. The day they were to leave they were to dine with another aunt of Norman’s, and Norman, accompanied by David, rode there on horseback, while his cousin Justin was to drive his mother in his buggy. She had very much enjoyed her daily drives over the prairies, enamelled with flowers, of every new variety of which Justin stopped to gather for her, and which she prized as memorials of those pleasant hours. At his aunt’s Norman saw the picture of his Cousin Walter—the hero of the wolf story—a face full of intelligence and sweetness, a slender form. He was a brilliant youth, with high hopes and aspirations, when, in the midst of his collegiate course, he was stricken down by cholera, and in a few days was numbered with the dead.