God in their own way, the members of the
first exploring party, crossing the plains to
Utah, scattered sunflower seed as they went.
The next summer, when the long trains of
wagons came through with all the women and
children, they had the sunflower trail to fol-
low. I believe that botanists do not confirm
Jake's [2] story, but insist that the sunflower was
native to those plains. Nevertheless, that
legend has stuck in my mind, and sunflower-
bordered roads always seem to me the roads
to freedom.

I used to love to drift along the pale yellow
cornfields, looking for the damp spots one
sometimes found at their edges, where the
smartweed soon turned a rich copper color and
the narrow brown leaves hung curled like co-
coons about the swollen joints of the stem.
Sometimes I went south to visit our German
neighbors and to admire their catalpa grove,
or to see the big elm tree that grew up out of a
deep crack in the earth and had a hawk's nest
in its branches. Trees were so rare in that
country, and they had to make such a hard
fight to grow, that we used to feel anxious
about them, and visit them as if they were
persons. It must have been the scarcity of

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