to the west. There, along the western sky-line it skirted a great
cornfield, much larger than any field I had ever seen. This cornfield, and
the sorghum patch behind the barn, were the only broken land in sight.
Everywhere, as far as the eye could reach, there was nothing but rough,
shaggy, red grass, most of it as tall as I.

North of the house, inside the ploughed fire-breaks, grew a thick-set strip
of box-elder trees, low and bushy, their leaves already turning yellow.
This hedge was nearly a quarter of a mile long, but I had to look very hard
to see it at all. The little trees were insignificant against the grass.
It seemed as if the grass were about to run over them, and over the
plum-patch behind the sod chicken-house.

As I looked about me I felt that the grass was the country, as the water is
the sea. The red of the grass made all the great prairie the colour of
winestains, or of certain seaweeds when they are first washed up. And
there was so much motion in it; the whole country seemed, somehow, to be
running.

I had almost forgotten that I had a grandmother, when she came out, her
sunbonnet on her head, a grain-sack in her hand, and asked me if I did not
want to go to the garden with her to dig potatoes for dinner.

The garden, curiously enough, was a quarter of a mile from the house, and
the way to it led up a shallow draw past the cattle corral. Grandmother
called my attention to a stout hickory cane, tipped with copper, which hung
by a leather thong from her belt. This, she said, was her rattlesnake
cane. I must never go to the garden without a heavy stick or a corn-knife;
she had killed a good many rattlers on her way back and forth. A little
girl who lived on the Black Hawk road was bitten on the ankle and had been