xXTI 
WHERE MOUNTAIN AND PRAIRIE 
MEET 
N giving the landscape temporary consid- 
eration we would incline to the opinion 
that if mountain and prairie were related 
at all, they were distant relatives. They dwell in 
places so far apart and in regions so remote in 
purpose and in place as to be aliens one to the 
other. Yet here, as in many matters, we are in 
error. These are near neighbors and fast friends. 
To-day I saw where they met and had holi- 
day. A patch of mountain poppies was girded 
about with the wild profusion of dwarf sun- 
flowers. I could have sung out like a boy with 
the first nibble of the spring. Here was the tryst 
of mountain and prairie. Sunflower and poppy. 
The poppy had wandered down from the moun- 
tain passes and acclivities and the sunflower had 
climbed on with the vagrant mood it wears in 
its yellow juices which course through its veins 
like ardent fires. The flower which far down 
on lower prairie levels stands tall as a man on 
horseback, here reaches barely to a grown man’s 
knees, but the smile of the sun is there; and the 
eternal welcome of the prairies is there, and the 
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