Some Winter Days in Iowa | Page 5

which is bathed in flame color, as if from a forest fire.
You are alone and yet not alone. A rabbit scurries across your pathway.
A faint little squeak voices the fright of a mouse. There is a swoop of
wings which you neither distinctly hear nor clearly see, yet you are
aware, in a less marked degree than was the mouse, that an owl was
near. You feel certain that the downy woodpecker is asleep in that neat
little round hole on the southwest side of a tree trunk, just a little higher
than you can reach. In the early afternoon you saw a red squirrel go
gaily up a tall red oak and climb into his nest of leaves. You fancy he is
snugly coiled there now. This recent hill of fresh dirt--strange sight in
January--was surely made by a mole, and you know that they are all
somewhere beneath your feet: moles, pocket gophers, and the pretty
striped gopher which used to sit up on his hind legs, fold his front paws,
and look at you in the summer time, then give a low whistle and duck;
meadow mice in their cozy tunnels through which the water will be
pouring when the spring freshets come; the woodchuck in his long,
long sleep, and the chipmunk with his winter store of food. And so
watching, listening, and musing you come at length to the western edge
of the woodland and look across the prairie, far as the eye can reach, to
where the red ball of the sun hangs scarce a yard above the horizon.
You look upon a scene which is peculiar to this part of Iowa alone. It is
not found in any other state or nation on earth. "These are the gardens
of the desert, for which the speech of England has no name--the
Prairies."
"Lo they stretch In airy undulations, far away, As if the ocean, in his
gentlest swell Stood still, with all his rounded billows fixed, And
motionless, forever."

The "rounded billows fixed" are the paha ridges which the glaciers
made. They are not high enough to obstruct the view, nor to mar its
ocean-like effect. In the middle distance you may see a farm windmill
from sail to platform, but away across the snow-plain sea you catch
only the uppermost part of the white sails. The rest is concealed from
view by the illusory rise of the foreground toward the horizon--for this
twenty-mile stretch of prairie has an illusory curve similar to that seen
from all ocean shores. But now the sun has disappeared and the
windmills, houses, groves, and fences which looked like black etchings
against the flame-colored sky slowly vanish, first far away toward the
bluffs on the yon shore of the prairie sea, then nearer, nearer, comes the
gloom until the fence across the first field is scarcely discernible. The
bright vermilion fades at length to misty gray and lights appear in the
windows of the farm homes.
* * * * *
This sunset and twilight scene, peculiar to Iowa, is succeeded by the
pageant of the stars. These are not peculiar, in neighboring latitudes, to
any clime or time. They are the same stars which sang together when
the foundations of the earth were fastened; the same calm stars upon
which Adam gazed in remorse, the night he was driven from the garden
of Eden. The Chinese, the Chaldeans, the Egyptians, the Hebrews, the
Greeks, the Romans counted the hours of the night by the revolutions
of the Greater and the Lesser Bear around Polaris, and guided their
crafts and caravans by that sure star's light:
"And therefore bards of old, Sages and hermits of the solemn wood,
Did in thy beams behold That bright eternal beacon, by whose ray The
voyager of time should shape his needful way."
These
"Constellations of the early night That sparkled brighter as the twilight
died And made the darkness glorious"
were mysteries to Ptolemy and to Plato, as well as to Job. All ages of
mankind must have watched and wondered, pondering over the

unsolved problems. When the First Great Cause projected all these
whirling fire-mists into illimitable space with all the laws of physics,
chemistry, evolution in perfect working order, did he choose this earth
as humanity's only home? Is this the only planet with a plan of
salvation? Is this mere speck among all the myriads of worlds in the
solar system, and the other systems, the only creation of His hand
which has known a Garden of Eden, a Bethlehem, and a Calvary?
When the sun has lost his heat and the cold crystals of the earth have
fought their last fight with cellular structures, and won; when all the
fairy forms of field and forest are only