stood sometime, in sheer delight of it, and drawn into distended lungs the air clarified by hundreds of miles of sweep over an inland sea, the nearest shore not a score of miles away, and filtered through aromatic forests to your senses, an invisible elixir, exhilarating, without a headache as the price?  Have you seen the tiger-lilies and crimson Indian-tobacco blossoms flashing in the lowlands?  Have you trapped the mink and, visiting his haunts, noticed there the old blue crane flitting ever ahead of you through dusky corridors, uncanny, but a friend?  Have you—­but there are a thousand things!

If you have not seen or known or felt all these fair things—­so jumbled together in the allusion here, without a natural sequence or thought or reason or any art—­if you have not owned them all and so many others that may not here be mentioned, then you have missed something of the gifts and glories of growth in a new land.  Such experience comes but to one generation.  But one generation grows with the conquest, and it is a great thing.  It is man-making.

And from the east came more hewers of wood, not drawers of water, and the axe swung all around, and new clearings were made and earlier ones broadened, and where fireweed first followed, the burning of the logs there were timothy and clover, though rough the mowing yet, and the State was “settled.”  Roads through the woods showed wagon-ruts, now well defined; houses were not so far apart, and about them were young orchards.  The wild was being subjugated.  The tame was growing.  The boy was growing with it.

There was nothing particularly novel in the manner of this youth’s development, save that, as he advanced in years, he became almost a young Indian in all woodcraft, and that the cheap, long, single-barreled shotgun, which was his first great personal possession, became, in his skilled hands, a deadly thing.  Wild turkey and ruffed grouse, and sometimes larger game, he contributed to the family larder, and he had it half in mind to seek the remoter west when he grew older, and become a mighty hunter and trapper, and a slaughterer of the Sioux.  The Chippewas of his own locality were scarcely to be shot at.  Those remaining had already begun the unpretending life most of them live to-day, were on good terms with everybody, tanned buckskin admirably, and he approved of them.  With the Sioux it was quite different.  He had read of them in the weekly paper, which was now a part of progress, and he had learned something of them at the district school—­for the district school had come, of course.  It springs up in the United States after forests have been cut away, just as springs the wheat or corn.  And the district school was, to the youth, a novelty and a vast attraction.  It took him into Society.