Percy will be back to-morrow. It will be a different looking country to what it was when he left. I've been staring up at a cobalt sky, and begin to understand why people used to think Heaven was somewhere up in the midst of such celestial blue. And on the prairie the sky is your first and last friend. Wasn't it Emerson who somewhere said that the firmament was the daily bread for one's eyes? And oh, the lovely, greening floor of the wheat country now! Such a soft yellow-green glory stretching so far in every direction, growing so much deeper day by day! And the sun and space and clear light on the sky-line and the pillars of smoke miles away and the wonderful, mysterious promise that is hanging over this teeming, steaming, shimmering, abundant broad bosom of earth! It thrills me in a way I can't explain. By night and day, before breakfast and after supper, the talk is of wheat, wheat, wheat, until I nearly go crazy. I complained to Dinky-Dunk that he was dreaming wheat, living wheat, breathing wheat, that he and all the rest of the world seemed mad about wheat.
"And there's just one other thing you must remember, Lady Bird," was his answer. "All the rest of the world is eating wheat. It can't live without wheat. And I'd rather be growing the bread that feeds the hungry than getting rich making cordite and Krupp guns!" So he's risking everything on this crop of his, and is eternally figuring and planning and getting ready for the grande débâcle. He says it will be like a battle. And no general goes into a battle without being prepared for it. But when we read about the doings of the outside world, it seems like reading of happenings that have taken place on the planet Mars. We're our own little world just now, self-contained, rounded-out, complete.
