The Madame raises her eyebrows and coughs slightly, but I take no notice.
“And as for wheat, sir,—wheat? why it’s immense! Thirty-five and forty bushels to the acre is the regular yield, and of oats they will produce fifty or sixty bushels, and of barley eighty or ninety. As for corn, I forget the figures, but when we go down the road this afternoon you’ll see great green fields of it that’ll make you think you’re back on the banks of the Wabash. There isn’t anything they can’t raise in these bottoms, where they have more water than they know what to do with, and it’ll be only a few years before this whole great patch of greasewood and chalk will be verdant with—with potatoes and corn.”
It was a bit of a break, but when this young man gets a fair grip upon poetry he don’t let go so easy. He frowned down the suspicion of a smile round the corner of our eyes, and rising to his feet, continued:
“I tell you, sir, in five years from now the people of this favored spot can say in the words of the immortal singer—speaking historically, of course, you understand—can say,
“Behind, they saw the snow-cloud tossed
By many an icy horn”
* * * * * * * *
“Before, warm valleys, wood-embossed
And green with vines—
(watermelons, squashes, pumpkins, hops, morning glories, grapes, strawberries, parsley, honeysuckles—I’ve seen ’em all!)