34 AUTUMN NOTES IN IOWA 



what fancies of life beyond the seas are roused 

 b}' such names as Gladstone, Cambridge, Huxley, 

 Melbourne, Madrid, Manilla. Night fell on us 

 amid the broken, unfilled borderlands of the Big- 

 Sioux and the Big Muddy — ^ in a region of scarred 

 bluffs and deep ravines, where the evening shad- 

 ows were heavy under the hills and the sunlight 

 lingered on long, high trestles across semi-moun- 

 tainous streams. So we sped, curving and curv- 

 ing, climbing and descending, into the darkness, 

 tow^ard the land of the Dakotas. 



Grinnell, September 26, 1901. 

 About nine o'clock this evening, Curtis and I 

 strolled across the open moonlit fields to a famil- 

 iar willow hedge, remote from roads and houses, 

 where we built a low fire of cornhusks and willow 

 twigs, and roasted field corn and wild crab apples. 

 We picked the crab apples from a little clump of 

 scraggy trees reminding one of the stunted trees, 

 with crowded branches twisted into fantastic 

 curves, along some windy, sandy reach of lower 

 Cape Cod. The ' ^ puckery, ' ' oily but acid flavor of 

 the fruit, uncooked, provides some sensation of the 

 wild and primitive. Our roasting process also was 

 rather primitive, yielding results of value to the 

 imagination rather than the palate. In early days, 

 however, wild crab apples, with wild grapes and 

 wild plums were not despised by pioneer house- 



