A prairie scene.
--A correspondent of the London Times, in describing the Prince's visit to the Western prairies, writes as follows:‘ The Prince was certainly most fortunate in his visit, for the time of the year. He had almost universal sport. He saw a prairie thunder storm, a prairie fire of immense extent, and, above all, a prairie sunset. The latter took place in all its supernatural glory — a glory which can never be described or understood by those who have not seen it — while the party were shooting quail the night before their departure. As the sun neared the rich green horizon, it turned the whole ocean of meadow into a sheet of gold which seemed to blend with the great firmament of reds and pinks — pale rosy orange hues, and solemn, angry looking crimson clouds above, till not only the sky, but all the land around, was swathed in piles of color, as if the sinking sun shone through the earth like mist, and turned it to a rainbow. The immensity of stillness which lay in the prairie then — a stillness as profound and vast as the green solitude itself, while not a breath stirred over the whole horizon as the great transmutation went slowly on, and the colors over the land turned from rose to pink, to orange, to red and crimson — darkening and darkening always, as the tints ebbed out like a celestial tide, leaving fragments of scarlet clouds over the heavens — the embers of the fire which had lit the prairie in a flame of glory. There was such a quiet, unspeakable richness in this grand farewell of day — such a terrible redness about the sky at last, that one could almost fancy some supernatural phenomenon had occurred, that the sun had gone forever, and left a deep and gory wound across the darkening sky. Night was a relief compared to this dread, lurid fire in heaven — a fire which the clouds seemed to close in upon, and stifle out with difficulty --a fire which, like the paintings of the sunset before the Deluge, left always an ominous anger in the heavens, even when the night was far advanced, and the prairie clothed in a blue mist which rose over it like water. It was such a sunset as moved the rural inhabitants of Dwight; such a sunset as even the "oldest inhabitant," who had been there some five years, had never seen before.
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