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Canalis, like Nodier, enchants the reader by an artlessness which is genuine in the prose writer and artificial in the poet, by his tact, his smile, the shedding of his rose-leaves, in short by his infantile philosophy. He imitates so well the language of our early youth that he leads us back to the prairie-land of our illusions.
It was rather ponderously clever, I suppose; but I was tired of both verbal quibbling and roadside gallantry. "Do you want to get out of that hole?" I demanded. For it's a law of the prairie-land, of course, never to side-step a stranger in distress. "Not if it means an ending to this interview," he told me. It was my turn to eye him. But there wasn't much warmth in the inspection.
Menial service to a free trapper! There are no servants in prairie-land. Our horses and mules were picketed on a piece of open ground, each having his "trail-rope," which allowed a circuit of several yards. The two tents were pitched side by side, facing the stream, and the waggon drawn up some twenty feet in the rear.
Out beyond the ridges, indistinct in the glare, stretched an illimitable expanse, gray and dull that was the prairie-land. An eagle, lord of all he surveyed, sailed round and round in the sky. Below this grassy summit yawned a valley, narrow and long, losing itself by turns to distant east and west; and through it ran a faint, white, winding line which was the old St. Vrain and Laramie Trail.
Texas, the prairie-land, has risen in arms against the tyrant Santa Anna, and the greedy despotism of the Romish priesthood, and implores the assistance of the citizens of the Union. We have therefore convoked an assembly of the inhabitants of this city, and trust to see it numerously attended. "The Committee for Texas."
In the midst of one of the stretches of rolling prairie-land, great herds of buffalo are scattered in groups, browsing with all the air of security peculiar to domestic cattle. Happily their memories are short.
Now and then there were copses that stood apart from the larger tracts of forests, looking like islands upon the surface of a green sea, and by the name of "islands" these detached groves are known among the hunters and other denizens of prairie-land.
At first it seemed to be given to mixed farming a good deal; afterwards to wheat, oats, and barley. But a great part is uncultivated prairie-land, grass, with sparse bushes and patches of brushwood and a few rare trees, and continual clumps of large golden daisies. Occasional rough black roads wind through the brush and into the towns, and die into grass tracks along the wire fences.
Utterly unprepared for such rapid movements, the men at the Crossing, unorganized, hardly realizing what had happened, fell easy victims. The township, like the fort, was wiped from the fair face of the budding prairie-land. The horrors of the massacre were too terrible to be dealt with here. Every man, woman, and child now living in the country has heard the tales of that awful week.
Slowly the melancholy Indian-summer day waned as Jonathan strode out of the woods into a plain beyond, where he was to meet Wetzel at sunset. A smoky haze like a purple cloud lay upon the gently waving grass. He could not see across the stretch of prairie-land, though at this point he knew it was hardly a mile wide.
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