CHAPTER IV 

 GLACIER PARK 



THE lure of the prairie, the lure of the rolling plains, 

 the lure of the sky-blue mountains! How good it was 

 to leave the East behind, to leave behind those midland 

 cities belching smoke, Chicago with its sooty roar, St. 

 Paul and the muddy Mississippi ! Now there was noth- 

 ing but prairie, endless wheat fields level to the sky with 

 little domestic oases where house and barns snuggled 

 into their encircling grove, to escape perhaps the Sum- 

 mer sun, perhaps the inquisitive eye of the next door 

 neighbour a mile away. Night came on the prairie, a 

 dusky emanation from the ground, and dawn came with 

 a wonderful orange glow, and night again. Then, at the 

 second dawn, we looked on a different world, a treeless 

 world but no longer an infinite calm ocean of grain. A 

 great ground swell had crossed the universe in the 

 night, and the green land was slowly settling down to 

 rest again with the heaving of ten thousand billows; 

 wave after wave of grassy slope, heave after heave of 

 the restless land, all day beside the rushing train. And 

 then the miracle, the sky-blue mountains! 



They have no foothills, these Rocky Mountains of 



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