But how different the loneliness of a soft-waving prairie,—­soft even before the new grass springs; soft in outline, in coloring, in its whispering silence!  Nothing sad or harsh; no threat or repulsion; only mild hope, and promise of ease and abundance.  Whether the glad flames sport amid the long dry grass of last year, or the plough turn up a deep layer of the exhaustless soil, or flocks of prairie-chickens fly up from every little valley, images of life, joy, and plenty belong to the scene.  The summer flowers are not more cheerful than the spring blaze, the spring blackness of richness, or the spring whirr and flutter.  The sky is alive with the return of migratory birds, swinging back and forth, as if hesitating where to choose, where all is good.  Frogs hold noisy jubilees, ("Anniversary Meetings,” perhaps,)—­very hoarse, and no wonder, considering their damp lodging,—­but singing, in words more intelligible than those of the opera-choruses, “Winter’s gone!  Spring’s come!  No, it isn’t!  Yes, it is!”—­and the Ayes have it.  The woodpecker’s hammer helps the field-music, wherever he can find a tree.  He seems to know the carpenter is coming, and he makes the most of his brief season.  All is life, movement, freedom, joy.  Not on the very Alps, where their black needles seem to dart into the blue depths, or snow-fields to mingle with the clouds, is the immediate, vital sympathy of Earth with Heaven more evident and striking.

The comparative ease with which prairie regions are prepared for the advent of the great steam-car is exactly typical of the facilities which they offer to other particulars of civilization.  As the smoothing of the prairie path, preparatory to railway speed, is but short work, compared with the labor required in grading and levelling mountainous tracts for the same purpose, so the introduction of all that makes life desirable goes on with unexampled rapidity where the land requires no felling of heavy timber to make it ready for the plough, and where the soil is rich to such a depth that no man fears any need of new fertilizing in his life-time or his son’s.  We observe this difference everywhere in prairiedom; and it is perhaps this thought, this close interweaving of marked outward aspect with great human interests, that gives the prairie country its air of peculiar cheerfulness.  To man the earth was given; for him its use and its beauty were created; it is his idea which endows it with expression, whether savage or kindly.  Rocks and mountains suggest the force required to conquer difficulties, and the power with which the lord of creation is endowed to subdue them; and the chief charm and interest of such regions is derived, consciously or unconsciously, from this suggestion.  Prairie images are more domestic, quiet, leisurely.  No severe, wasting labor is demanded before corn and milk for wife and little ones are wrung from reluctant clods.  No danger is there of sons or daughters being obliged to quit their homes and roam over foreign