When Jim was still an obscure young lawyer, struggling to make his way in New York, his career was suddenly advanced by a brilliant marriage.

That is one reason why we do not often meet. He is legal counsel for one of the great Western railways, and is sometimes away from his New York office for weeks together. It was a kind of freemasonry, we said.Īlthough Jim Burden and I both live in New York, and are old friends, I do not see much of him there. We agreed that no one who had not grown up in a little prairie town could know anything about it. We were talking about what it is like to spend one’s childhood in little towns like these, buried in wheat and corn, under stimulating extremes of climate: burning summers when the world lies green and billowy beneath a brilliant sky, when one is fairly stifled in vegetation, in the color and smell of strong weeds and heavy harvests blustery winters with little snow, when the whole country is stripped bare and gray as sheet-iron. The dust and heat, the burning wind, reminded us of many things.

While the train flashed through never-ending miles of ripe wheat, by country towns and bright-flowered pastures and oak groves wilting in the sun, we sat in the observation car, where the woodwork was hot to the touch and red dust lay deep over everything. He and I are old friends–we grew up together in the same Nebraska town–and we had much to say to each other.

LAST summer I happened to be crossing the plains of Iowa in a season of intense heat, and it was my good fortune to have for a traveling companion James Quayle Burden–Jim Burden, as we still call him in the West. TO CARRIE AND IRENE MINER In memory of affections old and true

My antonia book 3