Never a tawny-beached ocean has the sweetness of the prairie slew.

Rippling and blue, with long grass up to its edge, a spot of dancing

light set in the miles of rustling wheat, it retains even in July, on an

afternoon of glare and brazen locusts, the freshness of a spring

morning. A thousand slews, a hundred lakes bordered with rippling barley

or tinkling bells of the flax, Claire passed. She had left the

occasional groves of oak and poplar and silver birch, and come out on

the treeless Great Plains.

She had learned to call the slews "pugholes," and to watch for ducks at

twilight. She had learned that about the pugholes flutter choirs of

crimson-winged blackbirds; that the ugly brown birds squatting on

fence-rails were the divine-voiced meadow larks; that among the humble

cowbird citizens of the pastures sometimes flaunted a scarlet tanager or

an oriole; and that no rose garden has the quaint and hardy beauty of

the Indian paint brushes and rag babies and orange milkweed in the

prickly, burnt-over grass between roadside and railway line.

She had learned that what had seemed rudeness in garage men and hotel

clerks was often a resentful reflection of her own Eastern attitude

that she was necessarily superior to a race she had been trained to call

"common people." If she spoke up frankly, they made her one of their

own, and gave her companionable aid.

For two days of sunshine and drying mud she followed a road flung

straight across flat wheatlands, then curving among low hills. Often

there were no fences; she was so intimately in among the grain that the

fenders of the car brushed wheat stalks, and she became no stranger, but

a part of all this vast-horizoned land. She forgot that she was driving,

as she let the car creep on, while she was transported by Armadas of

clouds, prairie clouds, wisps of vapor like a ribbed beach, or mounts of

cumulus swelling to gold-washed snowy peaks.

The friendliness of the bearing earth gave her a calm that took no heed

of passing hours. Even her father, the abstracted man of affairs, nodded

to dusty people along the road; to a jolly old man whose bulk rolled and

shook in a tiny, rhythmically creaking buggy, to women in the small

abrupt towns with their huge red elevators and their long, flat-roofed

stores.

Claire had discovered America, and she felt stronger, and all her days

were colored with the sun.

She had discovered, too, that she could adventure. No longer was she

haunted by the apprehension that had whispered to her as she had left

Minneapolis. She knew a thrill when she hailed--as though it were a

passing ship--an Illinois car across whose dust-caked back was a banner

"Chicago to the Yellowstone." She experienced a new sensation of common

humanness when, on a railway paralleling the wagon road for miles, the

engineer of a freight waved his hand to her, and tooted the whistle in

greeting.




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