Page:Peak and Prairie (1894).pdf/64

From Wikisource
Jump to navigation Jump to search
This page has been proofread, but needs to be validated.

always hovers over the prairies, was complete.

As his hostess came out with a long-handled spade in her hand, he cried, "That is the most magnificent thing I ever saw!"

She did not answer immediately, but stood leaning upon the spade, and gazing forth as intently as if it had been to her too a revelation.

Then she drew a long breath and said, in a rapt tone, as though the words came to her one by one: "Yes, it makes you feel sometimes as if your soul would get away from you."

They stood there for a while, watching the cloud-shadows swimming upon that mystic sea. The smoke of an express train on the horizon seemed fairly to crawl, so great was the distance.

"That looks like the smoke of a steamer," Sir Bryan observed.

"Then you think it seems like the sea, as everybody else does," she answered. "I never saw the sea, myself, but I don't believe it can be finer than this."

There was another pause, and then, with a sudden change of mood, to which she seemed subject, the rapt worshipper turned her thoughts to practical things, saying briskly: "Here's your spade, Mr. Bryan. You had