Rensselaer Republican, Volume 17, Number 10, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 13 November 1884 — The Prairies and the Mountains. [ARTICLE]

The Prairies and the Mountains.

I was just thinking I would like to be gent out West just about now on some commission for an able and enterprising journal, at a large salary, railroad passes, nothing to do, and two or three of the boys to help me to do it. I just feel a bit prairie hungry. A Western man never loses his love for the prairie. They call them “prurries” in Indiana, “peraries” in Illinois, “prairs” in Nebraska, “perars” in Kentucky, and “paraides” in Boston; but whatever you call them they are all the same. I would like to hear the wind blowing across the great plains in Kansas, over the beautiful treeless bluffs at Manhattan, or along the great reaches out at Lamed. You know the wind never blows anywhere else as it does across the prairies. And there it blows all the time, 365 days a year. It roars in your ears now and then like the rush of many waters; it sighs and sings and whispers throrfgh the tall swaying grass; its song is never monotonous; it varies all day long; and-as it sings and whistles it breathes into your soul a sense of perfect freedom r such as you can experience? nowhere else. A mountain is a prison compared with the 1 prairie. The mountain threatens you; it is not loving and tender, it frowns upon you with great gray rocks; it“ never smiles; it scowls with dark ravines and treacherous precipices; it terrifies you with blinding fogs and drifting mists; it swathes its stony, gorgon head in black clouds and speaks to you in muttering syllables of thunder. You cannot breathe in the narrow passes; you cannot ran on the steep, rough winding paths; you bend your head back until your neck aches, to see a little strip of blue sky. But the prairie—boundless, immense, a billowy sea of emerald, dotted with the rank, bright-colored flowers thatfplay with the singing, whispering winds; the prairie that-seems bounded only by the bending sky and the stars; the resin weed gives you the compass and the compass gives you the path; go where you will and as you please, at a foot pace or a headlong gallop, free as the yinds that make the prairie their only home. There is no room for them anywhere else. I don’t suppose I will get the commission J am hinting at, But I would like to go out to the prairies and cool off for about ten minutes. — Burdette , in the Brooklyn Eagle. ** Thb late Senator Anthony’s present of 6,000 volumes to Brown University is valued at $25,000. The Bev. Edward Hale is now conducting the morning prayers at Harvard Univrrsity. . " '■> ; r ; '