It was all woods once." "You cut down trees to make land grow grass," said Thatcher.

"I should think that God must have meant grass to be the sign of good ground." "Isn't the sweat of your face just as plenty when you delve in the prairies ?" asked Dunlap.
"You fly in the face of God's decree, and run against His manifest warning when you try to make a prairie into a farm," said Evans.
"You'll see!" "Sold again, and got the tin, and sucked another Dutchman in!" was the ditty that ran through my head as I heard this.

Old man Evans' way of looking at the matter seemed reasonable to my cautious mind; and, anyhow, when a man has grown old he knows many things that he can give no good reason for.

I have always found that the well-educated fellow with a deep-sounding and plausible philosophy that runs against the teachings of experience, is likely, especially in farming, to make a failure when he might have saved himself by doing as the old settlers do, who won't answer his arguments but make a good living just the same, while the new-fangled practises send their followers to the poor-house.
At that moment, I would have traded my Iowa farm for any good piece of land covered with trees.

But Dunlap and Thatcher had something else to talk to me about.