THIRD ANNUAL YEAR BOOK — PART X. 603 



In the distance, bare and ancient, is seen the point which first beckons 

 to the rising sun, and last bids him goodnight — the point of our desti- 

 nation. Pursuing our journey, we may, if it is an early autumn, discover a 

 clump of scarlet-fruited sumac on the margin of an open meadow, with 

 perhaps a foreground of Lilium superbum, that would capture the heart 

 of a landscape gardener or enrapture the soul of an artist. And thus we 

 delightfully wend our way toward higher attitudes. Within a half 

 miles from the summit and perhaps a hundred feet lower is a small lake 

 nestling among the surrounding hills, covering about two acres, with 

 abrupt wooded margins on two sides, where three varieties of pond lilies 

 greet the rising sun with smiling petals. This is called Dead Man's 

 Lake, but no ghostly form rises from the surface to explain the ghastly 

 name. 



One more upward pull and the summit of the knob is reached. If 

 one could only truthfully repeat the lines attributed to Alex. Selkirk on 

 the Island of Juan Ferandez. 



"I am monarch of all I survey 



And my right there is none to dispute," 



then, indeed, would one be a "land-lord." Not less than fifty thousand 

 acres of beautiful, undulating, fertile land may be seen with the naked 

 eye from this point, and with a good glass, four times as many. 



To the north into Minnesota, east into Cerro Gordo and Worth 

 counties, south into Hancock county as far as the M. & St. P. R. R., and 

 to the west with undulating prairies of Winnebago with Forest City sit- 

 ting like a queen on the hills that have given her the appropriate name 

 of "Hill City." 



Lime creek, whose source is in Mennesota almost north of the point 

 where we stand, winds its sinuous way through a rich and lovely valley, 

 bearing west until it gets almost to Forest City where it broke through 

 the morainic hills, and then turns toward the east till it passes Pilot 

 Knob (about two miles south,) then bears north again into Worth county, 

 have been thrown from its general course to the southeast by these huge 

 piles of clay left by the plows of the infinite. 



What a grand sight is before us! There was a time, perhaps, when 

 scouts of the warlike tribes that preceded us may have climbed this 

 prominence to sight a tawny-skinned enemy or to light their beacon fires, 

 but today they are a memory only to the early pioneer, and to the younger 

 generation as little known and understood as the natives of the Philip- 

 pines. 



Lime creek, timber-lined and valley-nestled, describes more than 

 a half circle at our feet. Natural grove and open space succeed each 

 other in delightful panorama. The protection from prairie fires which 

 the stream affords has encouraged the growth of trees, and hundreds of 

 acres that might otherwise have been as treeless as a prairie are adorned 

 with the covering which nature chooses when she wants to make a country 

 fit for a man to live in. 



