In the months of April and May the world sent a skirmish-line into this
echoless land to take possession of a belt of territory six hundred
miles long and one hundred miles broad. The settlers came like locusts;
they sang like larks. From Alsace and Lorraine, from the North Sea, from
Russia, from the Alps, they came, and their faces shone as if they had
happened upon the spring-time of the world. Tyranny was behind them, the
majesty of God's wilderness before them, a mystic joy within them.
Under their hands the straddle-bug multiplied. He is short-lived, this
prairie insect. He usually dies in thirty days--by courtesy alone he
lives. He expresses the settlers' hope and sense of justice. In these
spring days of good cheer he lived at times to sixty days--but only on
stony ground or fire-scarred, peaty lowlands.
He withered--this strange, three-legged, voiceless insect--but in his
stead arose a beetle. This beetle sheltered human beings, and was called
a shack.
They were all alike, these shacks. They had roofs of one slant.
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