ITS SOIL AND SCENERY. 71 



and numerous plantations made, it will lose the distinctive 

 character of prairie, and assume the ordinary aspect of a rich 

 well-clothed rural district. Nor is the prairie much more bare 

 of wood even at present than many of the best arable districts 

 of Scotland. Along the hollows scooped out by the rivers and 

 streams there is always woodland. The woodpecker, prairie 

 fowl, and quail are seen in abundance. The hickory tree yields 

 nuts, the maple sugar, and hogs are turned into the woods to 

 eat the mast. On the open ground the road, which is a mere 

 track over the prairie, is constantly undergoing change, for 

 the new settler puts up his fence on his boundary line, right 

 across the track. The traveller must then strike a fresh track 

 for himself. Orchards, chiefly of peaches, are everywhere being 

 planted near the homesteads. One farmer, who had been nine 

 years in the country, told me that he and his family cropped 

 eighty acres, that the average yield of wheat was twenty to 

 twenty-five bushels an acre, and of Indian corn forty. He 

 would probably fatten forty hogs, worth 40s. each. He had a 

 flock of inferior merino sheep in rather low condition. But the 

 cattle on the prairie were large and in good condition, with a 

 good skin. Three-year-old oxen, large and in what we should 

 reckon fair condition for stall-feeding, are valued here at not 

 more than 4. 



I must now ask the reader to turn back with me in a north- 

 easterly direction, by the branch line of the railway, towards 

 Chicago. On this course we shall have a distance of 250 miles 

 still to traverse. For nearly eighty miles north of Centralia 

 the prairie continues of the same grey soil which I have just 

 described, more silicious than the black soil, and therefore bet- 

 ter adapted for winter wheat, hardly so prolific of Indian corn, 

 nor so suitable for oats and potatoes. It is more picturesque, 



