Last tribute of respect and admiration.  One little brown house at the end of an avenue is shuttered down, and a doctor’s buggy stands before it.  On the door a large blue and white label says—­’ Scarlet Fever.’  Oh, most excellent municipality of St. Paul.  It is because of these little things, and not by rowdying and racketing in public places, that a nation becomes great and free and honoured.  In the cars to-night they will be talking wheat, girding at Minneapolis, and sneering at Duluth’s demand for twenty feet of water from Duluth to the Atlantic—­matters of no great moment compared with those streets and that label.

A day later.

’Five days ago there wasn’t a foot of earth to see.  It was just naturally covered with snow,’ says the conductor standing in the rear car of the Great Northern train.  He speaks as though the snow had hidden something priceless.  Here is the view:  One railway track and a line of staggering telegraph poles ending in a dot and a blur on the horizon.  To the left and right, a sweep as it were of the sea, one huge plain of corn land waiting for the spring, dotted at rare intervals with wooden farmhouses, patent self-reapers and binders almost as big as the houses, ricks left over from last year’s abundant harvest, and mottled here and there with black patches to show that the early ploughing had begun.  The snow lies in a last few streaks and whirls by the track; from sky-line to sky-line is black loam and prairie grass so dead that it seems as though no one year’s sun would waken it.  This is the granary of the land where the farmer who bears the burdens of the State—­and who, therefore, ascribes last year’s bumper crop to the direct action of the McKinley Bill—­has, also, to bear the ghastly monotony of earth and sky.  He keeps his head, having many things to attend to, but his wife sometimes goes mad as the women do in Vermont.  There is little variety in Nature’s big wheat-field.  They say that when the corn is in the ear, the wind, chasing shadows across it for miles on miles, breeds as it were a vertigo in those who must look and cannot turn their eyes away.  And they tell a nightmare story of a woman who lived with her husband for fourteen years at an Army post in just such a land as this.  Then they were transferred to West Point, among the hills over the Hudson, and she came to New York, but the terror of the tall houses grew upon her and grew till she went down with brain fever, and the dread of her delirium was that the terrible things would topple down and crush her.  That is a true story.

They work for harvest with steam-ploughs here.  How could mere horses face the endless furrows?  And they attack the earth with toothed, cogged, and spiked engines that would be monstrous in the shops, but here are only speckles on the yellow grass.  Even the locomotive is cowed.  A train of freight cars is passing along a line that comes out of the blue and goes on till it meets the blue again.  Elsewhere the train would move off with a joyous, vibrant roar.  Here it steals away down the vista of the telegraph poles with an awed whisper—­steals away and sinks into the soil.