'Are there any limits to the possibilities of it?' I demanded.
'Who knows? We're only at the beginning. We'll show you a brick-making
plant, out on the prairie, run by gas. But just now we want to show you
one of our pet farms.'
Away swooped the motors, like swallows, over roads any width you please,
and up on to what looked like the High Veldt itself. A Major of the
Mounted Police, who had done a year at the (Boer) war, told us how the
ostrich-farm fencing and the little meercats sitting up and racing about
South Africa had made him homesick for the sight of the gophers by the
wayside, and the endless panels of wire fencing along which we rushed.
(The Prairie has nothing to learn from the Veldt about fencing, or
tricky gates.)
'After all,' said the Major, 'there's no country to touch this. I've had
thirty years of it - from one end to the other.'
Then they pointed out all the quarters of the horizon - say, fifty miles
wherever you turned - and gave them names.
The show farmer had taken his folk to church, but we friendly slipped
through his gates and reached the silent, spick-and-span house, with its
trim barn, and a vast mound of copper-coloured wheat, piled in the sun
between two mounds of golden chaff.
