Hence, I am told, a sickness of the vision peculiar to these
empty plains.
Yet perhaps with sunflowers and cicadae, summer and winter, cattle,
wife and family, the settler may create a full and various
existence. One person at least I saw upon the plains who seemed in
every way superior to her lot. This was a woman who boarded us at
a way station, selling milk. She was largely formed; her features
were more than comely; she had that great rarity - a fine
complexion which became her; and her eyes were kind, dark, and
steady. She sold milk with patriarchal grace. There was not a
line in her countenance, not a note in her soft and sleepy voice,
but spoke of an entire contentment with her life. It would have
been fatuous arrogance to pity such a woman. Yet the place where
she lived was to me almost ghastly. Less than a dozen wooden
houses, all of a shape and all nearly of a size, stood planted
along the railway lines. Each stood apart in its own lot. Each
opened direct off the billiard-board, as if it were a billiard-
board indeed, and these only models that had been set down upon it
ready made. Her own, into which I looked, was clean but very
empty, and showed nothing homelike but the burning fire.
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