On a Moraine

UP on the shoulder of a terminal moraine was a barley-field whose fence was to furnish me with stone; and I prospected its beauties with a six-pound sledge. “ Hardheads ” many of them were called, and they let fly enough sparks that summer to light the fire for a thousand years. They were igneous rocks, and they responded in terms of fire.

Such rock! Rag-carpets woven in garnet and topaz; petrified Oriental rugs; granites in endless designs of Scotch mixture, as if each bowlder were wearing the plaid of its clan; big, uncouth, scabiose, ignorant-looking hardheads that opened with a heart of rose, — each one a separate album opening to a sample from a different quarry, I have seen cloven field-stone that deserved a hinge and a gold clasp; I have one in sight now which is such a delicate contrast of faintest rose and mere spiritual green that it is like the first blush of dawn. Imagine smiting a rock until the fragments sting you in the face, and then seeing it calmly unfold the two wings of a moth! I have broken into a rock which pleased me so well that I held it in mind in order to match it; but though I had the pick of a hundred and sixty loads that summer I never found another. There is “ individuality ” for you.

Some of them are “ niggerheads.” These are the hardest rock known to practical experience. There are those that have refused to succumb to the strongest hitters in the country. Some of them will break and others will not; the only way is to try. Fortunately I had had some early training as a blacksmith; but this was as if the smith were trying to break his anvil. I have seen the steel face of a hammer chip off without making a mark on one.

And yet the glaciers wore them off to make soil and left them rounded like big pebbles! I never realized what ground is, till I became acquainted with the stones that did the grinding.

My fence was eight to ten feet in thickness and shoulder high; and similar windrows of rock ran over the moraine in all directions, like a range upon a range. It is, of course, valuable land that warrants a wall like that. The barley-field might easily have defied a siege-gun on all four sides, for it had had so many bowlders on it that they had been built up into more of a rampart than a windrow. On a nearby field from which the timber had been removed, but which, notwithstanding, was far from “ cleared,” it looked as if it had hailed bowlders. You could have forded your way across it without putting a foot to ground. I have seen places where the glaciers had deposited rocks in surprising uniformity of size, and as thick as the heads of an audience (a comparison that means no harm, I trust).

Because of my encounters with “ niggerheads,” and other layerless or massive rock, I had difficulty in getting a handle which would not give out. Not that I broke them with mislicks, but the sudden bounce of the steel jolts the grain of the wood apart, and then a split begins to work its way up the handle. After this happens a man will not try to crack many bowlders, for the split hickory vibrates in a way that hurts. That sudden sting and numbing of the arm is the only sensation I ever came across that resembles the sting of a Texas scorpion; and that is an injection of liquid lightning that suffuses the membranes from hand to shoulder, and dwells a while and fades away. I might say here that the sting of the dreaded scorpion is harmless, like that of the tarantula, as any one with a few experiences knows. A wrong-headed bowlder that has kept itself intact for ages and spits fire at you, and then takes measures to protect itself, is far more dangerous. One of them shot off a piece with such force that it went through my clothing and made a respectable wound. This, however, is just what is needed to rouse you up and make you hit back; and when you have had success with this one you are sure to pass on to another.

There is an enticement in their secret, locked-up beauty that lures you on from rock to rock till nightfall. Thus you are kept at it, till some day you find you have become a slave of the exercise habit; you are addicted to sunshine and sweat and cool spring water; your nose, so long a disadvantage to you, comes to life and discovers so many varieties of fresh air that every breath has a different flavor to it. As for myself, I rather prefer to take wild plum or clover in my atmosphere — or a good whiff of must off the barley-field. Along in July it is excellent to work somewhere in the jurisdiction of a basswood tree. Compare this with the office-building or the street-car, where the only obtainable breath is second-hand. Nobody could now coax you back to where people have eyes that see not, tongues that taste not, and noses that smell not unless they have to. I have experienced smells in a city that would make a baby cry.

In this leisurely bowlder-breaking you have become so strong that you need work to make you comfortable. When you wake up in the morning rested, your fingers have a feeling of the absent sledgehandle; there is a missing presence at the end of your arm which makes you understand easily enough how a person can have feeling in a limb that has long been cut off; and not till you have taken it up again does your body seem entire. When a man has become so strong that he needs work to make him comfortable, he would pound rock if it were only limestone in a quarry. What then is it to go bowlderhunting in a barley-field ? Rocks of all ages and varieties, sedimentary, metamorphic, and igneous; and now and then a plutonic piece that was unthinkably old when the Atlantosaurus strolled about, stepping thirty feet at a stride. Sixty millions of years, scientists agree, since life in its lowest forms made its appearance on the globe; four hundred millions since the molten earth began to cool and form plutonic rock! If a man has antiquarian tastes let him browse in one of these stone-fence libraries with a sledge. It is like opening ancient volumes with beautiful pictures in them.

Bowlder-breaking exercises all the parts, intellectual, physical, and æsthetic, — it sounds as if it were Culture. If so, it is the only form of it I ever came across which did not spoil one’s appetite. Your digestion attends to its own business, and you become a disciple of plain thinking and high living. If I could explain it in all its branches at once, I would no doubt succeed in starting up a cult of glacial stonesmith. A six-pound sledge is the true key to science and health.

It will probably be said that I am a fanatic. But wait. Please listen to what I have to reveal. I rolled off a rusty-black sort of a one. I worked it around into position for striking. The sledge simply rebounded. Nine, ten, eleven blows; and then it fell in two, disclosing a black interior of beautiful mat texture. Diagonally across the face of it was a straight white stripe as wide as one’s finger. And an inch and a half away was a contrasting stripe as straight and fine and parallel as if it had been made on a loom; it was like a bold design in French silk. With its slightly wedged shape, it looked for all the world like a dashing four-inhand tie. It had broken in just the way to make a key for the arch of the fireplace. Here then was very good luck indeed, — the very necktie of the house all done.

I next essayed a light-complexioned one; and it opened the first time I knocked. It was a light gray stone that glistered as with spangles of silver; it had shining scales like a herring, and each scale a little mica mirror that flashed cool metallic beams. Could anything be in better taste than light gray and silver ? I picked it up tenderly and set it down right-side-up, next to the keystone. I passed on. The next was a moth — but I shattered one of the wings. It was some sort of infinitely fine greenish sand that had absorbed chocolate-colored matter, and become a pudding-stone with a big plum of the subdued purplish-chocolate in the proper place, and I had gone through it in a cross-section. It was really a chocolatecolored bronze, powdered with that peculiar soft green that old statues take on; and the evanescent powdery effect was so convincing that I thought, at first, I could brush it off. This antique delicacy was solid and everlasting; I would not have taken a dollar for it then and there. I set it carefully alongside the knight of the silver scales.

But enough. If I fought it out on this line it would take all summer. I merely wish to indicate what I am talking about. If I am a fanatic, let it be so. If I were a crazy Cromwell, it is one of these same processions of roundheads that I would want to lead over the face of the country. If I could only march a mile of them through the cities giving demonstrations and lectures! They are a rough-looking lot, but there is beauty in them. I once stood, hat off, in a little church in New York where they go to worship John La Farge; and if there is as much beauty and inspiration in one of those stained-glass windows as there is dispersed all over the face of this country, put me down for a plebeian. It is as a crazy-quilt beside a Daghestan.

Whenever I stopped for breath I had a bird’s-eye view of agriculture, the fields all laid out in crops of various colors so that the country was a map of itself. Nearer at hand it was a most statistical scene, the corn all adding itself up in rows, and the Holstein cattle set down in black and white — a pleasing prospect of diversified farming. The name of glacial soil is Diversity. So many elements have been ground up in the making that it will raise any sort of an honest crop; and if it is not tropically brilliant it is steady-going and dependable. The drainage is just suited to the amount of rainfall; there is inexhaustible gravel to make roads; and every field has stone on it for an everlasting fence. As I patrolled my altitudinous ramparts, sledge in hand, I had a commanding view of southern Wisconsin — a diagram of prosperity. Here and there were patches of hardwood or tamarack; and a mile or so to my right, down at the side of the range, was Heart Lake showing its shape in silver. I think the peculiar charm of Wisconsin lies in the fact that it is a man’s-size country, — lakes that you can row across, hills that you can climb. And so near together that there is always a new shining goal, a lake, to tempt you onward. I am almost tempted into the folly of trying to put it in words.

I had not swung my hammer many days before I realized that I was midway between two bells. Back on Miracle Hill, that lifts its church-crowned summit like a commander from out the procession, was the bell of the Carmelite monks who were expelled from France: its tones came sweet and plaintive over the heads of the hills, and spoke to all the country. An equal distance from me, in the opposite direction, was the town bell, that rings curfew as faithfully every evening as if it still had a Yankee at the rope. Near by was a Norwegian settlement, originally composed of sixty families. Not a great distance away was a village where German is spoken more exclusively, it is said, than anywhere in the country. Back in the depths and heights of the moraine was Erin, still strongly Irish, with its log cabins and old charcoal-pits, attesting its respectable age. At every cross-roads were the Swiss, making cheese. And in the distance I could see the newly-primed houses of the “ hands ” at the factory—still more nationalities. The solid foundation of it all is the German, a lover of the soil. Wisconsin is a favorite stamping-ground of the Sociologist; and it is hardly to be wondered at that the state university excels in agriculture and the philosophy of government.

As my fence bordered a steep stretch of road along which the farmers passed with their loads of milk and hay and agricultural implements, I found myself in a position to become well introduced to my neighbors for miles around; and at times, when the sun was hot, I was quite willing to stop and explain my appreciation of the stone or talk about the crops. By fall I had met so many solid, wholesome Americans, of all nationalities, and so democratic, that I was really glad they had all had so much practice in meeting foreigners. An immigrant from the city they took to quite as naturally. And at what great risk to themselves! Suppose I had been a lawless literary hunter hoping to bag some rare specimen of fellow man and take him back to my magazine all mangled in his feathers!

I discovered but one new dialect; and that would not be accepted by any editor in the country. Had I come here for that purpose, it would have been a sorry day for me, as witness the following conversation. It is two German women who are speaking, in the presence of an Irish woman.

“Th’ tap o’ th’ marnin’ t’ ye, Mis’ Brettschneider. ’T is glad I am t’ see th’ likes av ye. Iss yer daughther Gretchen goin’ to the Hill th’ morrow? ”

“Faith an’ she is. Ven me bye Heinrich can get th’ bay haarse away from th’ plowin’ I t’ink I’ll go mesilf, bedad.”

This is not travesty; it is a report of German dialect. The manner of speech came about naturally enough. When the Germans arrived here in full force, the country was already settled, largely by Yankees and Irish; and the German had to buy his farm here or there. In this way a number of them found themselves located in the town of Erin, where, of course, they learned the language of their country. And I leave it to my fellow citizens in Wisconsin whether a German cannot speak as broad and rich a brogue as any son of Erin. This, although exceptional, is hardly an exaggeration of the cosmopolitan processes of democracy in Wisconsin. In other places you find the exact opposite. At many farmhouses, if you wish to be understood in English, it is necessary to address the father or mother, who were immigrants, and not the members of the second generation. The mother speaks English well, and her son, who works the farm and was born here, does not understand it. The parents, starting as farm-laborers among Yankees and New Yorkers, had to learn English; but when they had saved money and bought out their employers, — a very usual process, — and had a household of their own, they naturally reverted to their native tongue.

One day I took a trip to Miracle Hill, whose steeple dominates the scene for miles around. It is not till one goes to the top of one of these dome-like wooded knolls, three or four hundred feet up, and all built of gravel, that one begins to realize what a stone-crusher and moundbuilder a glacier was. And so recent it was! When a man considers with all his might the scientific rough estimate of four hundred million years as the time that has passed since the world began to harden and form plutonic rock, a glacier seems absolutely modern. If that Azoic, that no-animal time, is looked upon as being several thousand feet back, the glaciers will be but a few inches; thus one catches the spirit in which the scientist says, lightly, “ In times so recent as the Glacial Epoch.” If a plutonic bowlder, a fragment of Azoic time, could really speak the language that Wordsworth claims stones can speak, it could tell the whole story of life from the first microbe to the megatherium — and then the decline and fall to the mere elephant and man. The mention of a glacial epoch seems almost “ timely,” and the other is so far back that it is no time at all.

From the time the first life-cell floated in the sea around continents but partly formed, life and land progressed until the cave-dweller and his contemporary animals lived on the completed world. Possibly “there were giants in those days; ” but such of their stone implements as we have found would not indicate that they could handle a sledge any heavier than I swing myself. When this sort of man was fighting his fellow animals for their dens, the glaciers came down upon them. Through some great revolution in climate, the snow piled up season after season farther south, and moved along by expansion and contraction, helped somewhat by the downhill slope from the Laurentian range. It was as if the Arctic zone, with all its snowfields pressed into ice, had decided to migrate to a warmer clime. Those weighty ice-fields, big stone-mills grinding the grist of gravel and rounding off huge fragments of rock which had been torn bodily from their bed, — rolling and wearing and sliding them along and making soil of them, — kept melting at the edges as they reached the warmer clime; and there, dropping the bowlders and piling up the débris in a long line of mounds, made a moraine. One of these hills was but a good wagonload of gravel; and the whole shape of the scene was determined by the nature of the rounded rolling pebble. Where they did not make positive hills, and very steep, they dropped down a landscape of broad low knolls — rather like a hilly country melted and run together. Such is the Kettle Range of Wisconsin, so called because of the shape of the hills and valleys; such are all the small-lake regions. They are well named “glacial drift,” for when the winter is white upon them they look as if their whole substance were but the huge wind-work of the snow.

Between the hills are valleys without outlet — deep rounded kettles indeed that catch the water and hold it till it leaks out of the gravelly bottom. The whole country is rolling in the same basinlike way, so that in the farmer’s woods are little tarns that you could jump across, in the broad pasture-land are undrained bottoms where the tamarack finds a foothold, and in every day’s journey are a number of the beautiful spring-fed lakes with which summer resorters all over the United States are familiar. These lakes are but a larger manifestation of the blind valleys and the hollows in the pastureland; it is because of this nature of the surface, due to the rounded pebble, that there are so many small, clean-filtered lakes in a glacier-built country.

The limits of glacial action in the United States are marked by the Ohio and Missouri rivers. If one conceives the Ohio extending onward to the Atlantic through northern Pennsylvania, and the Missouri reaching to the Pacific through northern Washington, he has almost the exact boundaries beyond which the ice-fields did not encroach southward. All over this territory are evidences of their work, to a greater or less extent, here and there. The effects of glacial action are most marked in the Appalachian region, in a sense; for there, on the granite structure of the country, they could scratch the history of their progress as on tablets of stone. But in Wisconsin, a comparatively level country, they show themselves as complete country-makers, hill-builders, unhampered agents of their own sweet will. It was one of their favorite dumping-grounds. Thus Wisconsin has a furniture of hills which do not belong to it, a scenery which has rolled along and moved in; and all made up of pieces of the geological Everywhere. This state, the foundation of all these hills and knolls, might easily claim to be the oldest state in the Union, for it had its head out of water at a time when there was nothing else to be seen of the United States but the tops of the Appalachian Mountains. But the original state, as it were, has been quite covered with the recent addition of landscape. I had a well put down a hundred and thirtytwo feet, and brought up glacial matter all the way; but somewhere down there, had I kept on, I should have struck Wisconsin.

Such hills, while they lack the accentuation, the scenic ruggedness of rock, have yet an influence of their own; and this you feel especially when you get into the tumultuous heart of the range and look down into these bowl-like wooded valleys without outlet. They are not valleys with the life of outgoing streams and an open door to the rest of the world; they are deep privacies in the heart of nature, not intended for thoroughfare or habitation. The dark little pond at the bottom, forever unruffled, invites you down for a spell of deep and moody contemplation. They are retreats, places to go down into with your secrets, and then to leave and go up into the world again; the public may not pass through; and they are so constructed as to forfend them from all other uses. I have no doubt that many a penitent, on his way to the church on the Hill, has felt their subtle invitation, their promise of secrecy; it must have been on account of them, quite as much as the wide outlook from above, that the mysterious praying Hermit pitched his habitation on the summit. It seems quite natural that a place of holy pilgrimage should have grown up and established its wayside shrines amid such surroundings. These places of refuge hold a breezeless silence while you pray or think; and the way up to the panoramic summit, past the stations of the Cross, is not a mere matter of six or seven hundred feet: it is all the way from depression to elevation. They seem to have been made for the very purposes of a monk.

The trees here grow branchless to twice their wonted height, in the struggle to get their heads up into the light and air. So tall and thin are they from this sort of competition, one with another, that they cannot stand steady for a moment; they swing slowly from side to side, in long deliberate movements that seem actually solemn. They do this when there is hardly a breeze to be felt, as if it were an act of their own. In some places they are so tall and branchless, so out of all stable tree-proportions, that they seem not to be standing up, but hanging down from the sky —like big ropes of a belfry on which you might expect to ring the clear chimes of heaven.

One cannot help but feel, as he gets into the spirit of the soil, that those westward-wandering Yankees, who here stopped their prairie schooners and picked out the town-sites and put up the well-wrighted mills, — some of whose stones grind the feed to this day, — must have found a certain solemn welcome in the fieldstone scattered about. It was a new New England.

They did these things, and then, as usual, “went West.” Many of them fought in the war for the Union, and many came back; but altogether they kept drifting westward — “ Yankees ” all of them, whether they came from Connecticut or Pennsylvania, or the belligerent regions of the Erie Canal. And now the “ Yankee ” is to be found in greatest force in the burying-ground at the edge of the town. In such a cosmopolitan community it is a strange experience to wander into this quiet place and find such old worthies as Comfort and Thankful addressing yon from their headstones. Many of them date their birth back to the eighteenth century; and those who have 17— on their tombstones are known to the inhabitants, being local celebrities in death. I have had them all pointed out to me — and not by a Yankee — with a certain commendable pride; as if they gave a sort of historical ballast to the Ship of State.

In one of these villages, railroadless because it was founded before the railroad had found its way to these parts, and the one which is the most German of them all, there sat, until just recently, an aged and cultured gentleman — somewhat of a “ character ” in a fine way — after whom the town was named. When he died, a little over a year ago, he was the oldest “ living ” alumnus of Yale. There he sat, surrounded by his ancient collection of books, and some dusty paintings which he prized and valued highly, amid a population where German could be used to better effect than English. It was quite a change he had seen in his day. By such little glimpses of the past, one gets sudden perspective of the growth of Wisconsin. Even curfew, although a European custom, harks back to the Yankee. When it rings, at eight o’clock in winter and nine in summer, the children run home to their mothers as promptly as if they had seen the ghost of a Puritan. It is the Yankee’s passing bell.

In certain connections you will not hear their absence regretted. They were not, to tell the truth, very good farmers. It was not they who piled hundreds and hundreds of loads of stone into a single fence. But now, when there is sore need of good natural mechanics, — masons, joiners, machinists, — you will occasionally hear them spoken of as an ensample. Their buildings were well carpentered and joined; and in them are still preserved marvels of whittling in the way of canes and hat-racks. Some of the canes, as patiently elaborated as Japanese engraving, attracted attention at the Centennial Exposition. Even up on the cornice of the house now passed, may be seen a whittled frieze of acorn and oak-leaf. All of the “ Yankee ” did not leave, however; and what is left of him may not be studied in any one community, for he is pervasive and generally at home; he plays skät and schopskopf and drinks beer and speaks German; he is doctor, lawyer, and office-holder — in many ways a publican and sinner.

Small towns have a bad reputation; they are said to be given over to narrow views, backbiting, provinciality, and a general inbreeding of the species. For some reason, this is the exact opposite of the workings of village and country life in Wisconsin. And there is an absence of racial prejudice, even among small farmers, in communities, which is surprising there is a cosmopolitan spirit which one would expect only among the most traveled classes. I think it is due to this balanced heterogeneity of population acting under the particular conditions of the small town. In the small town a man is more of an individual; he is a larger fraction in the world; and so his importance to the community makes him more of a person than a member of a race. Even the little farming communities, racial colonies, cannot keep separate for long; they come together in working out road-taxes, in business and politics and farmer’s institutes; and they are brought next door to each other by the farm telephone. And on the monthly Fair Day, the most homekeeping are brought into contact with the whole surrounding population. As an agent of true democracy, this is entirely different from the Afeurasian mix-up of the big city. There the Congress of Nations is forced together in a factory, from which the Nations go home to a community, or, what is worse, to a life that is essentially a hermitage in the crowd, a no-connection vagabondage of rented life. In the country the contact is of a basically different kind; it is a communion between homes. As a result, the marriage record will show an appalling forgetfulness of the past history of kings. What is more desirable, however, is that cosmopolitan spirit on which democracy has got to be founded — the essential Americanism of the man who was born in Germany or Norway or a British island. By all sorts of influences the people are cohering. And if not in marriage, then in the saloon. In this country the German saloon, a solid institution, must be taken into account. Whatever its faults, it must be said that it is here a very crucible of democracy. This is a country of immigrants — seeing there is no other word for it. But here the word is ridiculous. The hills then are immigrants; the soil is a foreigner. The scenery itself is situated on land which might as easily rise up and claim to be the native country. And the immigrants are all being Americanized, not by any “ ism,” but by the good old glacial process of mixing them up and stirring them together.

From the artist standpoint, a moraine, seen from a distance, lacks accentuation; the hills all wear the same contour; they march in uniform and none assert themselves over the others except by being bigger. But is not their rounded, flowing, broad-based expression of peace and solid satisfaction just as good — or even better ? There is something German about a moraine, whether you view it from inside or out. It is a well-known fact that the dwellers in the most ancient ranges, such as the Jura in Switzerland, which Time has worn down to mere nubs of mountains, find that the hills make a place for themselves in the heart which grand peaks of the Alps cannot fill. Big, self-assertive young mountains — and the tallest are always the most recent in the world’s history — can be overbearing in their beauty; and after a while you want to go home. I can imagine an inhabitant of the Appalachians, whose asperities the ages have worn off until they are almost domesticated, being glad enough to get back from the company of the high-spirited and riotous Rockies.

However this may be, the contour of these glacial hills tells the truth about the country, for Wisconsin is the quiet, philosophic home of the cow. When the Japanese want the best Holsteins to help raise the war debt, they do not confine themselves to Holland, where the breed originated, but come here to Wisconsin. Japan has come and been satisfied and returned for more; and only recently the Cow Ambassador was back again negotiating with the farmers for cows with which to beat the world. While the average dairy herds throughout the state are not yet up to the standard that is hoped for, it is no small point of distinction to the government itself that it has developed the world’s champion cow. In the report published a year ago it was announced that Colantha 4th’s Johanna had produced in twelve months 27,432 pounds of milk, which made “ 3-15 pounds of butter per day for each day in the year.” By doing this for her master, the State, she conquered the best cow in Switzerland. While other cows, and indeed herself, have gone beyond this in individual yields of butter, it was the best yearly performance; she won the longdistance championship, as it were. And this is what counts in practical dairying.

By such example the state specialists raise the breed, and awaken among the farmers a spirit of emulation. While much fault is continually found with the average herd, there are plain farmers in Dodge County and otherwhere who have broken records of one kind or another, — short or long ones with, regard to milk or butter-fat, with this particular breed or that. When a farmer is working a cow to break a record he feeds her as industriously and scientifically as a locomotive fireman would stoke his engine on a trial run for a mail contract. This is kept up day after day or week after week, and a record kept of every ounce of milk, together with its daily test for richness. A long run like this is, as a farmer will tell you solemnly, “ hard on her constitution,” but she must do it if she would be a famous cow. It requires much stamina and digestive ability on her part, and much science on the part of the farmer; and while it might not seem very exciting sport to the city man, it is a matter of great importance to those who know what is going on. It is not so easy to be a cow as it looks.

The state university has always on its farm herds of cows and hogs that are being educated, — drawn out to see what they will make. When last I heard, there were some promising hogs at Madison; and recent triumph in this line was the great Berkshire, Star Masterpiece II. When Star Masterpiece went to Madison he was a little pig that cost seventy-five dollars, a descendant of many famous animals. He was fed on the best and kept in a “ blue-grass paddock; ” and when he had thus gone through Wisconsin University he was bought back by the man who had sold him, for one thousand dollars. “ From the day he came to the University farm as a small pig, until he left it, he never missed a meal and always consumed his allowance with a relish that caused many visitors to marvel at his great feeding quality.” He left behind him forty little pigs at the University who will try to outdo him. He is now a famous sire whose name stands high in hog literature; and his public is of a size that might give many a poet a pang of envy. In Wisconsin it is considered more of a triumph to do something like this than to have a victorious University eleven.

The milk goes to the cheese-factory at the crossroads, or to the creamery which is to be seen near the railway station — a “ milk-depot ” indeed. The disposal of the milk at the creamery is a most systematic operation. The farmer drives up to the side of the building, and his cans are hoisted to a loft, where the milk is weighed and tested with a sort of hydrometer which tells exactly the proportion of butter-fat in the product. Along with his empty cans he receives a brass check. Then he drives around to the other side of the little building, where there is a hose about the size used in metropolitan fire departments. He inserts the check in a slot in the side of the building, whereupon the hose squirts out his due amount of skim-milk. Then he drives home with the wagon-load of milk and feeds it to the hogs. This is the universal practice; it is a land that flows with milk, if not with honey.

Near the depot will be seen also the brewery which supplies the little town with beer, and probably a big malt-house which receives the barley of the region, and sprouts and dries it. Wisconsin malt is of a superior quality known all over the United States. The proprietors of the many malt-houses go all the way to New York and Pennsylvania to sell the malt that was made from the grain that grew in the country that Jack Frost built.

From this preëminence in milk and beer it might seem that Wisconsin produces nothing but drink; but this is not true. It is also a great tobacco country, and, as might be expected of a region with some of the features of New England, we raise a quantity of Connecticut broad-leaf. While the state does not lead Kentucky in this respect, a little town here claims to be the biggest tobacco market in the world. It is hardly likely that the Prohibition wave will make inroads in Wisconsin. Since the success of the movement throughout the United States, there has sprung up in Wisconsin an organization, with influential members in every village, which is busily fighting the battle of Beer for the whole nation. It is doubtful if any state in the Union, when put to it, could raise such an influential and able army of volunteers in the cause of “ Personal Liberty,” as the opposition to Prohibition is called. And yet it is not a country of drunkards; it is the very opposite. As compared with other parts of the country, even Milwaukee is notably temperate and steady-going.

But this is not continuing with matters on the moraine, unless, to see things from that standpoint, we are all of us Hardheads — as might be implied in certain obdurate and durable qualities. And a man who works a summer — two summers — on stone fence appreciates thoroughly the nomenclature which conceives these stubborn bowlders in terms of “ heads.” To trim them into shape you have to know how to take them, according to their shape and character, their stratification and lines of cleavage. In working plutonic or “ massive ” rock especially, you must become a phrenologist of hardheads; you must study their bumps and general mass. It is so with human individuals. More than one Hardhead of my acquaintance, plain practical men, have more in them than a finished quarry-stone might ever suspect. Uncouth, unpromising characters they may seem, so that you would hardly look for anything inside of them. But form their acquaintance, knock a few chips off them in social contact, and they will strike fire and open with a heart of rose. They are likely to surprise you.

What sort of average citizen will result from this mingling and rubbing together of diverse material ? What sort of foundation for democracy will it make ? Will strong racial idiosyncrasies disappear into one colorless mediocre mass of men ? It is a question which all guess at, to no definite purpose. Will not a glacial population be about the same as a glacial soil ? That is strong, steady-going, reliable, suited to any sort of crop. The United States is a large experiment in manbreeding. Horse-breeders have long given up the fallacy that like produces like, so far as the individual is concerned; it is the strain which counts. And the greatest triumphs in breeding have resulted from mixing two strains. Among us animals without pedigree, who can tell what surprising atavism lurks in the blood of some human “scrub!” Or what will be the result of this grafting of nation upon nation! It will certainly have some surprises in it, at least; and it is not this, but “inbreeding,” that really weakens.

And this reminds me to conclude — where possibly I should have begun— with the remarkable pedigree of the state itself. Stretching across Canada, north of the St. Lawrence, and ending in the regions about the source of the Mississippi, is a range of low granite hills called the Laurentian Highlands. These hills are really mountains that are almost worn out, for they are the oldest land in America, and, according to Agassiz, the oldest in the world. In the days when there was nothing but water on the face of the globe, these mountains came up — a long island of primitive rock with universal Ocean chafing against its shores. None of the other continents had put in their appearance at the time America was thus looking up. The United States began to come to light by the gradual uplifting of this land to the north and the appearance of the tops of the Alleghanies, which were the next in order. Later, the Rockies started up. The United States grew southward from Wisconsin and westward from the Blue Ridge. An early view of the country would have shown a large island which is now northern Wisconsin, and a long thin tongue of this primitive rock sticking down from Canada into Minnesota, and these two growing states looking out over the waters at the mere beginnings of mountain-ranges east and west. They were waiting for the rest of the United States to appear.

As the heated interior of the earth continued to cool and contract, and the water-covered crust sank in some places, and kept bulging up higher in others, the island of northern Wisconsin continued to grow; and the Alleghanies came up with quite a strip of territory at their base. The western mountains made no progress whatever; it was as if they had some doubt about the matter. A view at another stage of progress would have shown Wisconsin and Minnesota entirely out, and pulling up with them the edges of adjoining states, and a strip along the Atlantic about half as wide as New York or Pennsylvania. Still no United States. There was water between these two sections and some islands scattered about in the south. The western mountains had not been progressing at all; they lagged behind for æons. These two sections, beginning with Wisconsin and Minnesota in the west and the Alleghanies in the east, kept reaching out till they made continuous land; and thus Ohio and all those states between are some ages younger. But they are much older than the west; for at a time when the whole eastern half of the continent had long appeared, the Gulf Stream was flowing across the west, and the waters were depositing the small sea-shells which make the calcareous matter under Kansas loam. All that country is much younger, and the western mounttains are as big as they are simply because they have not had time to become worn down. As to Florida, it was a mere afterthought, an addition built on by coral insects.

The whole story of those east-central and southern states — how Pennsylvania and Ohio and Illinois got their coal, and Michigan her salt—would make a lengthy narrative; I have mentioned just enough to show the age of Wisconsin and the still greater age of some of that glacial matter that came down from the direction of the Laurentian Highlands. It is the oldest land in the world; and the other states, I am sure, will not resent my taking out the state’s pedigree and showing it. Wisconsin took part with the east in what geologists call the Appalachian Revolution, — is a veritable Daughter of the Revolution. I mention it merely because I think it greatly to the credit of a dairy state that, at a time so early in the world’s morning, she was up and doing.