One enchanted hour when she returned to youth and a belief in the possibility of beauty.

She had walked northward toward the upper shore of Plover Lake, taking to the railroad track, whose directness and dryness make it the natural highway for pedestrians on the plains.  She stepped from tie to tie, in long strides.  At each road-crossing she had to crawl over a cattle-guard of sharpened timbers.  She walked the rails, balancing with arms extended, cautious heel before toe.  As she lost balance her body bent over, her arms revolved wildly, and when she toppled she laughed aloud.

The thick grass beside the track, coarse and prickly with many burnings, hid canary-yellow buttercups and the mauve petals and woolly sage-green coats of the pasque flowers.  The branches of the kinnikinic brush were red and smooth as lacquer on a saki bowl.

She ran down the gravelly embankment, smiled at children gathering flowers in a little basket, thrust a handful of the soft pasque flowers into the bosom of her white blouse.  Fields of springing wheat drew her from the straight propriety of the railroad and she crawled through the rusty barbed-wire fence.  She followed a furrow between low wheat blades and a field of rye which showed silver lights as it flowed before the wind.  She found a pasture by the lake.  So sprinkled was the pasture with rag-baby blossoms and the cottony herb of Indian tobacco that it spread out like a rare old Persian carpet of cream and rose and delicate green.  Under her feet the rough grass made a pleasant crunching.  Sweet winds blew from the sunny lake beside her, and small waves sputtered on the meadowy shore.  She leaped a tiny creek bowered in pussy-willow buds.  She was nearing a frivolous grove of birch and poplar and wild plum trees.

The poplar foliage had the downiness of a Corot arbor; the green and silver trunks were as candid as the birches, as slender and lustrous as the limbs of a Pierrot.  The cloudy white blossoms of the plum trees filled the grove with a springtime mistiness which gave an illusion of distance.

She ran into the wood, crying out for joy of freedom regained after winter.  Choke-cherry blossoms lured her from the outer sun-warmed spaces to depths of green stillness, where a submarine light came through the young leaves.  She walked pensively along an abandoned road.  She found a moccasin-flower beside a lichen-covered log.  At the end of the road she saw the open acres—­dipping rolling fields bright with wheat.

“I believe!  The woodland gods still live!  And out there, the great land.  It’s beautiful as the mountains.  What do I care for Thanatopsises?”

She came out on the prairie, spacious under an arch of boldly cut clouds.  Small pools glittered.  Above a marsh red-winged blackbirds chased a crow in a swift melodrama of the air.  On a hill was silhouetted a man following a drag.  His horse bent its neck and plodded, content.