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Nevertheless the country had its corn-lands and was rich in minerals and cattle, from which the hides came regularly down the Rhone to be carried to the Mediterranean markets. "Long-haired" Gaul was at this date rude and superstitious, with that weird druidical religion which the Emperor Claudius had done his best to suppress. Its chief vice was that of drunkenness.
Their home was a little hut on the edge of a little village a Flemish village a league from Antwerp, set amidst flat breadths of pasture and corn-lands, with long lines of poplars and of alders bending in the breeze on the edge of the great canal which ran through it.
Over many a cold and desolate pass, crawling painfully across the wind-swept shoulders of the hills; down many a black mountain-gorge, where the river roared and raced before him like a savage guide; across many a smiling vale, with terraces of yellow limestone full of vines and fruit trees; through the oak groves of Carine and the dark Gates of Zagros, walled in by precipices; into the ancient city of Chala, where the people of Samaria had been kept in captivity long ago; and out again by the mighty portal, riven through the encircling hills, where he saw the image of the High Priest of the Magi sculptured on the wall of rock, with hand uplifted as if to bless the centuries of pilgrims; past the entrance of the narrow defile, filled from end to end with orchards of peaches and figs, through which the river Gyndes foamed down to meet him; over the broad rice-fields, where the autumnal vapors spread their deathly mists; following along the course of the river, under tremulous shadows of poplar and tamarind, among the lower hills; and out upon the flat plain, where the road ran straight as an arrow through the stubble-fields and parched meadows; past the city of Ctesiphon, where the Parthian emperors reigned, and the vast metropolis of Seleucia which Alexander built; across the swirling floods of Tigris and the many channels of Euphrates, flowing yellow through the corn-lands Artaban pressed onward until he arrived, at nightfall of the tenth day, beneath the shattered walls of populous Babylon.
It is not only the broad bottom of the valley that is cultivated; the sides of the hills are clothed up to the very clouds with vineyards and corn-lands, and are planted with all manner of trees, yielding fruit after their kind.
This bombshell, in its turn, had fallen at a time when the market had been 'boosted' beyond its real strength. In the language of the place, a slump was due. Reports from the corn-lands had not been good, and there had been two or three railway statements which had been expected to be much better than they were.
The corn of France is, in the corn-provinces, fully as good, and in most years nearly about the same price with the corn of England, though, in opulence and improvement, France is perhaps inferior to England. The corn-lands of England, however, are better cultivated than those of France, and the corn-lands of France are said to be much better cultivated than those of Poland.
There is no special loveliness in that gray country, with its rainy, sea-beat archipelago; its fields of dark mountains; its unsightly places, black with coal; its treeless, sour, unfriendly looking corn-lands; its quaint, gray, castled city, where the bells clash of a Sunday, and the wind squalls, and the salt showers fly and beat.
And then I believed, understood, and brought it home to myself as a fact that here in the corn-lands of Michigan, and amid the bluffs of Wisconsin, and on the high table plains of Minnesota, and the prairies of Illinois had God prepared the food for the increasing millions of the Eastern World, as also for the coming millions of the Western.
The green nest of the Berceau seemed to overflow with the singing of birds and the blossoming of flowers. The corn-lands promised a rare harvest, and the apple orchards were weighed down with their red and white blossoms.
Thus it appears that this great basin extends through so many degrees of latitude that its lakes and streams connect with the mineral regions and pine forests of the North, the wheat- and corn-lands and cattle-ranges of the Middle States, and the cotton-and sugar-plantations of the South.
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