THE PRAIRIE.
This word is pronounced by the common people pa-ra-re. I was in the peninsula of Michigan, and had been for a day or two traversing the most dreary country imaginable, when I saw for the first time a salt or wet prairie, which is only a swampy meadow, grown up in a rank, coarse, sedgy grass.
Not long after we began to catch glimpses of the upland prairies. These are either clear prairies, totally destitute of trees, or oak openings which consist of clear prairie and scattered trees. A clear prairie—a broad unvaried expanse—presents rather a monotonous appearance like the sea, but surely the human eye has never rested on more lovely landscapes than these oak openings present. They answered my conceptions of lawns, parks and pleasure grounds in England; they are the lawns, parks and pleasure grounds of nature, laid out and planted with an inimitable grace, fresh as creation.
In these charming woodlands are a number of small lakes, the most picturesque and delightful sheets of water imaginable. The prairies in the summer are covered with flowers. I am an indifferent botanist, but in a short walk I gathered twenty four species which I had not seen before. These flowers and woods and glittering lakes surpass all former conception of beauty. Each flower, leaf, and blade of grass, and green twig glistens with pendulous diamonds of dew. The sun pours his light upon the water and streams through the sloping glades. To a traveller unaccustomed to such scenes, they are pictures of a mimic paradise. Sometimes they stretch away far as the eye can reach, soft as Elysian meadows, then they swell and undulate, voluptuous as the warm billows of a southern sea.
In these beautiful scenes we saw numerous flocks of wild turkies, and now and then a prairie hen, or a deer bounding away through flowers. Here too is found the prairie wolf which some take to be the Asiatic jackall. It is so small as not to be dangerous alone. It is said however, that they hunt in packs like hounds, headed by a grey wolf. Thus they pursue the deer with a cry not unlike that of hounds, and have been known to rush by a farm-house in hot pursuit. The officers of the army stationed at the posts on the Prairies amuse themselves hunting these little wolves which in some parts are very numerous.
C. C.