It is a land which has never suffered violence at
the hands of the interior terrestrial forces; nothing is broken
or twisted or contorted or thrust out or up abruptly. The strata
are all horizontal, and the steepest mountain-slopes clothed with
soil that nourishes large forest growths.
I stayed at home, working on the farm in summer and going to school
in winter, till I was seventeen. From the time I was fourteen I
had had a desire to go away to school. I had a craving for knowledge
which my brothers did not share. One fall when I was about fifteen I
had the promise from Father that I might go to school at the Academy
in the village that winter. But I did not go. Then the next fall
I had the promise of going to the Academy at Harpersfield, where
one of the neighbor's boys, Dick Van Dyke, went. How I dreamed of
Harpersfield! That fall I did my first ploughing, stimulated to
it by the promise of Harpersfield. It was in September, in the lot
above the sugar bush--cross-ploughing, to prepare the ground for
rye. How many days I ploughed, I do not remember; but Harpersfield
was the lure at the end of each furrow, I remember that. To this day
I cannot hear the name without seeing a momentary glow upon my mental
horizon--a finger of enchantment is for an instant laid upon me.
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