“The golden and the flame-like flower.”
Norman said good-by to Emily Percy at her door, for he and his mother were to spend the Sabbath with Mrs. Bowers, and a pleasant Sabbath it was. The conversation, in harmony with the day, on the piazza, after breakfast, beneath the shade of lofty spreading trees; the sermons and services of morning, afternoon, and evening, different in tone and character, but all profitable and pleasing; the visit to the large and interesting Sunday school, in which Mrs. Bowers taught a class, made the Sabbath a delightful one.
Monday morning Mrs. Percy took Mrs. Lester and Norman and Emily to her husband’s grain warehouse, the top of which they reached after ascending many flights of steps. The roof is of canvas, covered with tar, upon which, while it is warm, pebbles are thrown, making a durable and fire proof roof. The city lay beneath them; they could mark its great extent, trace the course of its dividing rivers, with their sails, and steamers, and propellers; see trains of cars arriving and departing; count the spires which
“With silent fingers point to heaven,”
and around all see the great lake and the encircling prairie.
The warehouse was filled with dust, as the machinery was in motion. Norman watched the elevators lifting up the grain from the rail-car on one side to the fifth story of the warehouse, where it is weighed and poured into great bins, whence it is discharged into vessels on the other side. The elevator is a series of buckets on an endless band. Thousands of bushels, from the wide prairies of Illinois, are thus elevated, weighed, and transferred from car to boat, to be sent to the Eastern states or to Europe.
The saddest sight Norman saw in this city was the great number of saloons, as they call the shops where liquor is sold, where drunkards are made, and where many an unwary victim is lured to destruction. In almost every block, they tempt the thoughtless; music sounds her welcome; vice puts on her most attractive mien; and young men forget a father’s counsel, a mother’s prayers; and for the momentary gratification of their appetites they offer up reputation, character, health, life, and their eternal all; a costly sacrifice! Everything lost, and nothing gained but degradation, misery, and death.
CHAPTER V.
ON THE ROCK RIVER.
“These are the gardens of the desert; these,
The unshorn fields, boundless and beautiful,