VALLEYS, PLAINS, AND LOWLANDS 



247 



away, and when their fingers are stilled the 

 great Penelope will once more speed the shuttle. 

 The prairie grass may wave again when the 

 ploughshare is beaten to dust and the Dakota 

 village, even in its ruins, shall have perished. 

 Nature will come to its own again, for during 

 all these centuries of man's dominion on the 

 earth it has not ceased to whisper in the ear of 

 history: "They shall build, but I will throw 

 down/' In its own good time, the ravaged 

 prairie will be re-covered with a mantle of 

 waving green ; the by-ways and the haunts of 

 man will be obliterated, and the sun will shine, 

 the wind will blow up and over the divides and 

 swales, blowing once more toward No Man's 

 Land. 



The flattest plains in the world are those that 

 have been at one time the beds of vast inland 

 seas or lakes. The plains of Hungary are of 

 this type. The largest one is now drained by 

 the Danube, and is not remarkable except for 

 its marshes, through which the river winds. It 

 is not very different in appearance from the or- 

 dinary coast-lying plain, which is to be found 

 in almost every sea-bordered country. Properly 

 speaking, the coastal plain is a tract of land 

 reclaimed from the sea, either by the slow up- 



