But neither of them
said anything about it. In fact, I thought that Grandma Thorndyke was
not so friendly in the spring as she had been in the fall--and, of
course, I could not put myself forward. I had the pure lunkhead pride.
So I had not seen Virginia for months. We early Iowa settlers, the men
and women who opened up the country to its great career of development,
shivered through that winter and many like it, in hovels that only broke
the force of the tempest but could not keep it back. The storms swept
across without a break in their fury as we cowered there, with no such
shelters as now make our winters seemingly so much milder. Now it is
hard to convince a man from the East that our state was once
bare prairie.
"It's funny," said the young doctor that married a granddaughter of mine
last summer, "that all your groves of trees seem to be in rows. Left
them that way, I suppose, when you cut down the forest."
The country looks as well wooded as the farming regions of Ohio or
Indiana. Trees grew like weeds when we set them out; and we set them out
as the years passed, by the million. I never went to the timber when the
sap was down, without bringing home one or more elms, lindens, maples,
hickories or even oaks--though the latter usually died. Most of the
lofty trees we see in every direction now, however, are cottonwoods,
willows and Lombardy poplars that were planted by the mere sticking in
the ground of a wand of the green tree.
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