As he went out again, Walter paused on the threshold to stare in
amazement. The sun was not yet above the horizon, but the whole world had
changed. He seemed to be standing in the center of a vast bowl. On every
hand the country appeared to curve upward. And the distance was no longer
distant! Groves of bare branched trees, streams, heights of land that he
knew to be miles away had moved in around the settlement until they
seemed only a few rods distant. To the west the line of hills,--Pembina
Mountains,--that he had never glimpsed, even on the clearest day, as more
than a faint blue line on the horizon, loomed up a mighty, flat-topped
ridge. Once before, in December, Walter had seen the landscape
transformed, but it was nothing to compare with this. Louis, familiar
from childhood with the mirage of the prairie, declared he had never
known such an extraordinary one.