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YORK. 
The first settlers of Green County never tired of ex- 
tolling the beauty of its prairies.  Sometimes, when 
they watched the play of the sunlight on the long 
ograssy billows before them, something of its bright- 
ness entered into their own hopes; and, with unusual 
confidence in the world's progress, they remarked to 
each other, sometime, though it wo'n't be in our day, 
these prairies will all be in farms. Then, because they 
had come, originally if not immediately, from a wooded 
country, and it seemed to them more in accordance with 
the fitness of. things to spend life making a clearing 
than to take one of nature's making, a great many of 
them turned their backs on the beautiful prairie and 
made their homes in the timber, though a few of them, 
after grubbing away their best years, adopted a contra- 
ry opinion and removed to the prairie., where they 
speedily acquired a competence. Even while they ad- 
mired the prairies, most of these denizens of the forest 
lamented the country's great scarcity of trees; and, as 
the Indian was known to be the cause of some of the 
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