Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/406

Rh expanses of which float masses of cloud. The soul expands itself, and, as it were, opens itself to the gentle, free wind which soughs over the plain, sounding melodiously, as it passes by the wires of the electric telegraph which are stretched across it. Each day of my journey westward was a festival, as I sped along, on wings of steam over the plain, ever and ever towards the golden setting sun, as if speeding into his realms of light!

The Valley of the Mississippi, from Minnesota in the North to Louisiana in the South, between the Alleghany Mountains on the East and the Rocky Mountains on the West, is throughout an immense “Rolling Prairie,” with ridgy heights and hollows of the most fertile soil, richly watered by rivers and lakes. This meadow-land, occupying a high level in the north, and producing northern pines and birches, gradually sinks lower and lower as it approaches the South, until in Louisiana it becomes a swampy morass, where the alligator paddles in the mud, but where also the sugar-cane and the palmetto spring up in the warm air, and orange-groves shed their perfume around. It embraces much variety in soil, climate, and production. But you shall hear what a resident in this great valley, and one well acquainted with it, says of—

“That great central valley of the continent of North America. A valley extending through twenty-one degrees of latitude, and fifteen degrees of longitude, a valley just beginning to smile under the hand of cultivation, and which already invites to its large bosom those masses of people who are pouring out from the overstocked communities of the Old World, and which promises to requite the hand of cultivation by a provision for yet uncounted millions of the human race.

“Nature has gifted the soil in a remarkable degree with vegetable and mineral wealth, has bestowed upon it an exterior suited to every taste, and to the requirements of