'Tis always thus.

Our conceptions of things that we have not seen are almost invariably wrong.

Dick's eyes glittered, and his heart swelled, and his cheeks flushed, and his breath came thick and quick.
"There it is," he gasped, as the great rolling plain broke suddenly on his enraptured gaze; "that's it--oh!--" Dick uttered a yell that would have done credit to the fiercest chief of the Pawnees, and being unable to utter another word, he swung his cap in the air and sprang like an arrow from a bow over the mighty ocean of grass.

The sun had just risen to send a flood of golden glory over the scene, the horses were fresh, so the elder hunters, gladdened by the beauty of all around them, and inspired by the irresistible enthusiasm of their young companion, gave the reins to the horses and flew after him.

It was a glorious gallop, that first headlong dash over the boundless prairie of the "far west." The prairies have often been compared, most justly, to the ocean.
There is the same wide circle of space bounded on all sides by the horizon; there is the same swell, or undulation, or succession of long low unbroken waves that marks the ocean when it is calm; they are canopied by the same pure sky, and swept by the same untrammelled breezes.