All that country out around Moffitt is just as smooth as a checker-board, and looks as old as England.

You know how we used to burn the stumps out; and then somebody invented a stump-extractor, and we pulled them out with a yoke of oxen.

Now they just touch 'em off with a little dynamite, and they've got a cellar dug and filled up with kindling ready for housekeeping whenever you want it.
Only they haven't got any use for kindling in that country--all gas.

I rode along on the cars through those level black fields at corn-planting time, and every once in a while I'd come to a place with a piece of ragged old stove-pipe stickin' up out of the ground, and blazing away like forty, and a fellow ploughing all round it and not minding it any more than if it was spring violets.

Horses didn't notice it, either.
Well, they've always known about the gas out there; they say there are places in the woods where it's been burning ever since the country was settled.
"But when you come in sight of Moffitt--my, oh, my! Well, you come in smell of it about as soon.