Minute beauties of garden or flower were not for him.

The groves along the river had long since lost their charm because he knew their limits--they no longer appealed to his imagination.
A hundred times he said: "Come, let's go West and kill buffalo.
To-morrow we will see the snow on Pike's Peak." The wild country was so near, its pressure day by day molded his mind.

He had no care or thought of cities or the East.

He dreamed of the plains and horses and herds of buffalo and troops of Indians filing down the distant slopes.

Every poem of the range, every word which carried flavor of the wild country, every picture of a hunter remained in his mind.
The feel of a gun in his hands gave him the keenest delight, and to stalk geese in a pond or crows in the cornfield enabled him to imagine the joy of hunting the bear and the buffalo.