For every man sees through his own eyes.  To the emigrants whose white-top “prairie schooners” wound slowly along the road, these grass-grown hills and those far-away meadowy valleys were only so many places where good farms could be opened without the trouble of cutting off the trees.  It was not landscape, but simply land where one might raise thirty or forty bushels of spring wheat to the acre, without any danger of “fevernager;” to the keen-witted speculator looking sharply after corner stakes, at a little distance from the road, it was just so many quarter sections, “eighties,” and “forties,” to be bought low and sold high whenever opportunity offered; to Jim it was a good country for staging, except a few “blamed sloughs where the bottom had fell out.”  But the enthusiastic eyes of young Albert Charlton despised all sordid and “culinary uses” of the earth; to him this limitless vista of waving wild grass, these green meadows and treeless hills dotted everywhere with purple and yellow flowers, was a sight of Nature in her noblest mood.  Such rolling hills behind hills!  If those rolls could be called hills!  After an hour the coach had gradually ascended to the summit of the “divide” between Purple River on the one side and Big Gun River on the other, and the rows of willows and cotton-woods that hung over the water’s edge—­the only trees under the whole sky—­marked distinctly the meandering lines of the two streams.  Albert Charlton shouted and laughed; he stood up beside Jim, and cried out that it was a paradise.

“Mebbe ’tis,” sneered Jim, “Anyway, it’s got more’n one devil into it. Gil—­lang!”

And under the inspiration of the scenery, Albert, with the impulsiveness of a young man, unfolded to Whisky Jim all the beauties of his own theories:  how a man should live naturally and let other creatures live; how much better a man was without flesh-eating; how wrong it was to speculate, and that a speculator gave nothing in return; and that it was not best to wear flannels, seeing one should harden his body to endure cold and all that; and how a man should let his beard grow, not use tobacco nor coffee nor whisky, should get up at four o’clock in the morning and go to bed early.

“Looky here, mister!” said the Superior Being, after a while.  “I wouldn’t naow, ef I was you!”

“Wouldn’t what?”

“Wouldn’t fetch no sich notions into this ked’ntry.  Can’t afford tew.  ’Taint no land of idees.  It’s the ked’ntry of corner lots.  Idees is in the way—­don’t pay no interest.  Haint had time to build a ’sylum fer people with idees yet, in this territory.  Ef you must have ’em, why let me rec-ommend Bost’n.  Drove hack there wunst, myself.”  Then after a pause he proceeded with the deliberation of a judge:  “It’s the best village I ever lay eyes on fer idees, is Bost’n.  Thicker’n hops!  Grow single and in bunches.  Have s’cieties there fer idees.  Used to make money outen the