The country was now smooth and now broken, and Albert thought he had never seen the grass so green or the flowers so bright as they were this morning.

The streams they crossed were clear and cold, the sun shone hot upon them, but the sky was so blue and the earth so green that they both abandoned themselves to the pleasure of living with such a sky above and such a world beneath.

There were here and there a few settlers' houses, but not yet a great many.

The country was not a lonely one for all that.

Every now and then the frightened prairie-chickens ran across the road or rose with their quick, whirring flight; ten thousand katydids and grasshoppers were jumping, fluttering, flying, and fiddling their rattling notes, and the air seemed full of life.