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- 
The wilder- 
ness again. 
Flat plains. 
