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"But perhaps some of your eastern farmers would endure the Ohio dog-days for the sake of the miles of level grain-fields without a stone, without a break of any kind, which extend through the midland counties. When I first came West, I was overpowered with homesickness for the hills of New England; the endless plains were hateful to me, and I fairly pined to see a rock, or a narrow, winding road.
It lies uniform, and looks the same almost everywhere. It consists of flat grain-fields, with one and another birch-grove between them; or else of long stretches of forest ranges. It appears as if it had thought about nothing but grain and turnips and potatoes and spruce and pine. Then comes a sea-fiord that cuts far into it.
Bertha's mother had just come in from a hard morning's work in the fields. She had been helping her husband weed the garden. She spent a great deal of time outdoors in the summer-time, as many German peasant women do. They do a large share of the work in ploughing the grain-fields and harvesting the crops. They are much stronger than their American cousins.
While every one is guessing, the writer ventures to make a guess. It is that Greece will remain neutral, or will join the Allies. Without starving to death she cannot join the Germans. Greece is non-supporting. What she eats comes in the shape of wheat from outside her borders, from the grain-fields of Russia, Egypt, Bulgaria, France, and America.
South Australia is characterized by its prolific grain-fields, and Victoria is richest in auriferous deposits; but there is gold enough in all of these colonies to afford constant stimulus to mining enterprise, fresh discoveries in this line being made every month.
If California had been inhabited at this time, the state would not have been noted for orchards and grain-fields, but rather for its mineral wealth. There would have been comparatively little low land fit for cultivation, but the mountains, where almost all the precious metals are found, would have appeared nearly as they do to-day.
The grain-fields were soon bent double beneath the spasmodic shower. The poppies were drenched, so were the cobble paved courtyards; only the geese and the regiment of the ducks came abroad to revel in the downpour. The villas were hermetically sealed now their summer finery was not made for a wetting.
Three neat houses, one of them of logs, constituted the village, and all about were grain-fields rippled into waves by the northwest breeze. The first house, a quarter of a mile inland, I reached by a country roadway; it proved to be the postoffice of Point Sandy. Chickens clucked around me, a spaniel came fawning for attention, a tethered cow mooed plaintively, but no human being was visible.
The plain upon which we came was greener and more flourishing than that we had left. Trees were scattered here and there in clumps, and the grassy wastes, stretching beyond the grain-fields, were dotted with herds of cattle. Emir Dagh stood in the north-west, blue and distant, while, towards the north and north-east, the plain extended to the horizon a horizon fifty miles distant without a break.
The whole country we overlooked was planted with olive-trees, and, except the very summits of the mountains, covered with grain-fields. For two hours our course was north-east, leading over the hills, and now and then dipping into beautiful dells. In one of these a large stream gushes from the earth in a full fountain, at the foot of a great olive-tree.
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