“No,” said March.  “I’ve had a good deal of curiosity about it, but I’ve never been able to get away except in summer, and then we always preferred to go over the old ground, out to Niagara and back through Canada, the route we took on our wedding journey.  The children like it as much as we do.”

“Yes, yes,” said Fulkerson.  “Well, the natural-gas country is worth seeing.  I don’t mean the Pittsburg gas-fields, but out in Northern Ohio and Indiana around Moffitt—­that’s the place in the heart of the gas region that they’ve been booming so.  Yes, you ought to see that country.  If you haven’t been West for a good many years, you haven’t got any idea how old the country looks.  You remember how the fields used to be all full of stumps?”

“I should think so.”

“Well, you won’t see any stumps now.  All that country out around Moffitt is just as smooth as a checker-board, and looks as old as England.  You know how we used to burn the stumps out; and then somebody invented a stump-extractor, and we pulled them out with a yoke of oxen.  Now they just touch ’em off with a little dynamite, and they’ve got a cellar dug and filled up with kindling ready for housekeeping whenever you want it.  Only they haven’t got any use for kindling in that country—­all gas.  I rode along on the cars through those level black fields at corn-planting time, and every once in a while I’d come to a place with a piece of ragged old stove-pipe stickin’ up out of the ground, and blazing away like forty, and a fellow ploughing all round it and not minding it any more than if it was spring violets.  Horses didn’t notice it, either.  Well, they’ve always known about the gas out there; they say there are places in the woods where it’s been burning ever since the country was settled.

“But when you come in sight of Moffitt—­my, oh, my!  Well, you come in smell of it about as soon.  That gas out there ain’t odorless, like the Pittsburg gas, and so it’s perfectly safe; but the smell isn’t bad—­about as bad as the finest kind of benzine.  Well, the first thing that strikes you when you come to Moffitt is the notion that there has been a good warm, growing rain, and the town’s come up overnight.  That’s in the suburbs, the annexes, and additions.  But it ain’t shabby—­no shanty-farm business; nice brick and frame houses, some of ’em Queen Anne style, and all of ’em looking as if they had come to stay.  And when you drive up from the depot you think everybody’s moving.  Everything seems to be piled into the street; old houses made over, and new ones going up everywhere.  You know the kind of street Main Street always used to be in our section—­half plank-road and turnpike, and the rest mud-hole, and a lot of stores and doggeries strung along with false fronts a story higher than the back, and here and there a decent building with the gable end to the public; and a court-house and jail and two taverns and three or four churches.  Well, they’re all there in Moffitt yet, but architecture