2 JOHN BURROUGHS 



landscape as it is of the eastern. The predominant im- 

 pression is that of utility. Its beauty is the beauty of 

 utility. One does not say, what a beautiful view, but 

 what beautiful farms ; not what an attractive home, but 

 what a superb field of corn or wheat, or oats or barley. 

 The crops and the herds suggest a bounty and a fertility 

 that are marvelous, but the habitations for the most part 

 look starved and impoverished. The country roads are 

 merely dusty or muddy black bands, stretching across 

 the open land without variety and without interest. As 

 one's eye grows fatigued with the monotony, the thought 

 comes to him of what terrible homesickness the first set- 

 tlers on the prairies from New England, New York, or 

 Pennsylvania must have suffered. Their hearts did not 

 take root here. They did not build themselves homes, 

 they builded themselves shelters. Their descendants are 

 trying here and there to build homes, trying by tree plant- 

 ing and other devices to give an air of seclusion and 

 domesticity to their dwellings. But the problem is a hard 

 one. Nature here seems to covet the utmost publicity. 

 The people must build lower and more rambling houses, 

 cultivate more grassy lanes, plant longer avenues of trees, 

 and not let the disheveled straw stacks dominate the 

 scene. As children we loved to sit on the laps of our 

 fathers and mothers, and as children of a larger and older 

 growth we love the lap of mother earth, some secluded 

 nook, some cosy corner, where we can nestle and feel the 

 sheltering arm of the near horizon about us. 



After one reaches the more arid regions beyond the 

 Rockies, what pitiful farm homes one sees here and there 

 — a low one-room building made of hewn logs, the joints 

 plastered with mud, a flat mud roof, a forlorn looking 

 woman with children about her standing in the doorway, a 

 rude canopy of brush or cornstalks upheld by poles for shed 

 and outbuildings; not a tree, not a shrub near; a few acres 



