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ILIFE in the small towns of the older West moves slowly--almost as slowly as in the seaport villages or little towns of the East. Towns like Tyre and Bluff Siding have grown during the last twenty years, but very slowly, by almost imperceptible degrees. Lying too far away from the Mississippi to be affected by the lumber interest, they are ...

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I"Keep the main-travelled road till you come to a branch leading off--keep to the right. "IN the windless September dawn a voice went singing, a man's voice, singing a cheap and common air. Yet something in the elan of it all told he was young, jubilant, and a happy lover.Above the level belt of timber to the east a vast ...

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I"Mainly it is long and weariful, and has a home o' toil at one end and a dull little town at the other. "WHEN Markham came in from shoveling his last wagon-load of corn into the crib, he found that his wife had put the children to bed, and was kneading a batch of dough with the dogged action of ...

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I"But the road sometimes passes a rich meadow, where the songs of larks and bobolinks and blackbirds are tangled. "ROB held up his hands, from which the dough depended in ragged strings."Biscuits," he said with an elaborate working of his jaws, intended to convey the idea that they were going to be specially delicious.Seagraves laughed, but did not enter the ...

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ICHICAGO has three winds that blow upon it. One comes from the East, and the mind goes out to the cold gray-blue lake. One from the North, and men think of illimitable spaces of pinelands and maple-clad ridges which lead to the unknown deeps of the arctic woods.But the third is the West of Southwest wind, dry, magnetic, full of ...

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"And in winter the winds sweep the snows across it. "The night was in windy November, and the blast, threatening rain, roared around the poor little shanty of "Uncle Ripley," set like a chicken trap on the vast Iowa prairie. Uncle Ethan was mending his old violin, with many York State "dums!" and "I gal darns!" totally oblivious of his ...

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"Along these woods in storm and sun the busy people go. "THE tin-peddler has gone out of the West. Amiable gossip and sharp trader that he was, his visits once brought a sharp business grapple to the farmer's wife and daughters, after which, as the man of trade was repacking his unsold wares, a moment of cheerful talk often took ...

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IThe nearer the train drew toward La Crosse, the soberer the little group of "vets" became. On the long way from New Orleans they had beguiled tedium with jokes and friendly chaff; or with planning with elaborate detail what they were going to do now, after the war. A long journey, slowly, irregularly, yet persistently pushing northward. When they entered ...

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"Like the Main-Travelled Road of Life, it is traversed by many classes of people. "UNCLE ETHAN had a theory that a man's character could be told by the way he sat in a wagon seat."A mean man sets right plumb in the middle o' the seat, as much as to say, 'Walk, goldarn yeh, who cares!' But a man that ...

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IIT was the last of autumn and first day of winter coming together. All day long the ploughmen on their prairie farms had moved to and fro in their wide level fields through the falling snow, which melted as it fell, wetting them to the skin—all day, notwithstanding the frequent squalls of snow, the dripping, desolate clouds, and the muck ...

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I"Keep the main-travelled road up the coulee--it's the second house after crossin' the crick. "THE ride from Milwaukee to the Mississippi is a fine ride at any time, superb in summer. To lean back in a reclining chair and whirl away in a breezy July day, past lakes, groves of oak, past fields of barley being reaped, past hayfields, where ...