A TASTE OF KENTUCKY BLUE-GRASS 225 



In the course of the ten days that followed, 

 the last ten days of May, I had an opportunity 

 to taste it pretty well, and my mind has had a 

 grassy flavor ever since. I had an opportunity 

 to see this restless and fitful American nature 

 of ours in a more equable and beneficent mood 

 than I had ever before seen it in ; all its savage- 

 ness and acridness gone, no thought now but 

 submission to the hand and wants of man. I 

 afterward saw the prairies of Illinois, and the 

 vast level stretches of farming country of north- 

 ern Ohio and Indiana, but these lands were no- 

 where quite so human, quite so beautiful, or 

 quite so productive as the blue-grass region. 

 One likes to see the earth's surface lifted up and 

 undulating a little, as if it heaved and swelled 

 with emotion; it suggests more life, and at the 

 same time that the sense of repose is greater. 

 There is no repose in a prairie ; it is stagnation, 

 it is a dead level. Those immense stretches of 

 flat land pain the eye, as if all life and expres- 

 sion had gone from the face of the earth. 

 There is just unevenness enough in the blue- 

 grass region to give mobility and variety to the 

 landscape. From almost any given point one 

 commands broad and extensive views — immense 

 fields of wheat or barley, or corn or hemp, or 

 grass or clover, or of woodland pastures. 



With Professor Proctor I drove a hundred 

 miles or more about the country in a buggy. 

 First from Frankfort to Versailles, the capital of 

 Woodford County ; then to Lexington, where we 

 passed a couple of days with Major McDowell 



