"What they live that a-way fer? Hey? Mos'ly 'cause they can't live no other." Then, after a long pause, the Superior Being resumed in a tone of half-soliloquy: "A'n't a bed nur a board in the hull city of Red Owl to be had for payin' nur coaxin'. Beds is aces. Houses is trumps. Landlords is got high, low, Jack, and the game in ther hands. Looky there! A bran-new lot of fools fresh from the factory." And he pointed to the old steamboat "Ben Bolt," which was just coming up to the landing with deck and guards black with eager immigrants of all classes.
But Albert Charlton, the student, did not look back any longer. It marks an epoch in a man's life when he first catches sight of a prairie landscape, especially if that landscape be one of those great rolling ones to be seen nowhere so well as in Minnesota. Charlton had crossed Illinois from Chicago to Dunleith in the night-time, and so had missed the flat prairies. His sense of sublimity was keen, and, besides his natural love for such scenes, he had a hobbyist passion for virgin nature superadded.
"What a magnificent country!" he cried.
"Talkin' sense!" muttered Jim. "Never seed so good a place fer stagin' in my day."
For every man sees through his own eyes. To the emigrants whose white-top "prairie schooners" wound slowly along the road, these grass-grown hills and those far-away meadowy valleys were only so many places where good farms could be opened without the trouble of cutting off the trees. It was not landscape, but simply land where one might raise thirty or forty bushels of spring wheat to the acre, without any danger of "fevernager;" to the keen-witted speculator looking sharply after corner stakes, at a little distance from the road, it was just so many quarter sections, "eighties," and "forties," to be bought low and sold high whenever opportunity offered; to Jim it was a good country for staging, except a few "blamed sloughs where the bottom had fell out." But the enthusiastic eyes of young Albert Charlton despised all sordid and "culinary uses" of the earth; to him this limitless vista of waving wild grass, these green meadows and treeless hills dotted everywhere with purple and yellow flowers, was a sight of Nature in her noblest mood. Such rolling hills behind hills! If those rolls could be called hills! After an hour the coach had gradually ascended to the summit of the "divide" between Purple River on the one side and Big Gun River on the other, and the rows of willows and cotton-woods that hung over the water's edge—the only trees under the whole sky—marked distinctly the meandering lines of the two streams. Albert Charlton shouted and laughed; he stood up beside Jim, and cried out that it was a paradise.
"Mebbe 'tis," sneered Jim, "Anyway, it's got more'n one devil into it. Gil—lang!"
And under the inspiration of the scenery, Albert, with the impulsiveness of a young man, unfolded to Whisky Jim all the beauties of his own theories: how a man should live naturally and let other creatures live; how much better a man was without flesh-eating; how wrong it was to speculate, and that a speculator gave nothing in return; and that it was not best to wear flannels, seeing one should harden his body to endure cold and all that; and how a man should let his beard grow, not use tobacco nor coffee nor whisky, should get up at four o'clock in the morning and go to bed early.
"Looky here, mister!" said the Superior Being, after a while. "I wouldn't naow, ef I was you!"
"Wouldn't what?"
"Wouldn't fetch no sich notions into this ked'ntry. Can't afford tew. 'Taint no land of idees. It's the ked'ntry of corner lots. Idees is in the way—don't pay no interest. Haint had time to build a 'sylum fer people with idees yet, in this territory. Ef you must have 'em, why let me rec-ommend Bost'n. Drove hack there wunst, myself." Then after a pause he proceeded with the deliberation of a judge: "It's the best village I ever lay eyes on fer idees, is Bost'n. Thicker'n hops! Grow single and in bunches. Have s'cieties there fer idees. Used to make money outen the fellows with idees, cartin 'em round to anniversaries and sich. Ef you only wear a nice slick plug-hat there, you kin believe anything you choose or not, and be a gentleman all the same. The more you believe or don't believe in Bost'n, the more gentleman you be. The don't-believers is just as good as the believers. Idees inside the head, and plug-hats outside. But idees out here! I tell you, here it's nothin' but per-cent." The Superior Being puckered his lips and whistled. "Git up, will you! G'lang! Better try Bost'n."