“Some of this farm was prairie,” put in Preston, “and I don’t see but it’s just as good as the rest.”

“It was all openings,” replied Evans.  “The trees was here once, and got killed by the fires, or somehow.  It was all woods once.”

“You cut down trees to make land grow grass,” said Thatcher.  “I should think that God must have meant grass to be the sign of good ground.”

“Isn’t the sweat of your face just as plenty when you delve in the prairies?” asked Dunlap.

“You fly in the face of God’s decree, and run against His manifest warning when you try to make a prairie into a farm,” said Evans.  “You’ll see!”

“Sold again, and got the tin, and sucked another Dutchman in!” was the ditty that ran through my head as I heard this.  Old man Evans’ way of looking at the matter seemed reasonable to my cautious mind; and, anyhow, when a man has grown old he knows many things that he can give no good reason for.  I have always found that the well-educated fellow with a deep-sounding and plausible philosophy that runs against the teachings of experience, is likely, especially in farming, to make a failure when he might have saved himself by doing as the old settlers do, who won’t answer his arguments but make a good living just the same, while the new-fangled practises send their followers to the poor-house.  At that moment, I would have traded my Iowa farm for any good piece of land covered with trees.  But Dunlap and Thatcher had something else to talk to me about.  They were for the prairies, especially the prairies of Kansas.

“Kansas,” said Dunlap, “will be one of the great states of the Union, one of these days.  Come with us, and help make it a free state.  We need a hundred thousand young farmers, who believe in liberty, and will fight for it.  Come with us, take up a farm, and carry a Sharp’s rifle against the Border Ruffians!”

This sounded convincing to me, but of course I couldn’t make up my mind to anything of this sort without days and days of consideration; but I listened to what they said.  They told me of an army of free-state emigrants that was gathering along the border to win Kansas for freedom.  They, Dunlap and Thatcher, were going to Marion, Iowa, and from there by the Mormon Trail across to a place called Tabor, and from there to Lawrence, Kansas.  They were New England Yankees.  Thatcher had been to college, and was studying law.  Dunlap had been a business man in Connecticut, and was a friend of John Brown, who was then on his way to Kansas.

“The Missouri Compromise has been repealed,” said Thatcher, his eyes shining, “and the Kansas-Nebraska Bill has thrown the fertile state of Kansas into the ring to be fought for by free-state men and pro-slavery men.  The Border Ruffians of Missouri are breaking the law every day by going over into Kansas, never meaning to live there only long enough to vote, and are corrupting the state government.  They are