path so often obliterated by a fresh fall of snow; the cutting winds,
the bitter cold, the snow squeaking beneath our frozen cowhide boots,
our trousers' legs often tied down with tow strings to keep the snow
from pushing them up above our boot tops; the wide-open white landscape
with its faint black lines of stone wall when we had passed the woods
and began to dip down into West Settlement valley; the Smith boys and
Bouton boys and Dart boys, afar off, threading the fields on their way
to school, their forms etched on the white hillsides, one of the bigger
boys, Ria Bouton, who had many chores to do, morning after morning
running the whole distance so as not to be late; the red school house in
the distance by the roadside with the dark spot in its centre made by
the open door of the entry way; the creek in the valley, often choked
with anchor ice, which our path crossed and into which I one morning
slumped, reaching the school house with my clothes freezing upon me and
the water gurgling in my boots; the boys and girls there, Jay Gould
among them, two thirds of them now dead and the living scattered from
the Hudson to the Pacific; the teachers now all dead; the studies, the
games, the wrestlings, the baseball--all these things and more pass
before me as I recall those long-gone days. Two years ago I hunted up
one of those schoolmates in California whom I had not seen for over
sixty years. She was my senior by seven or eight years, and I had a
boy's remembrance of her fresh sweet face, her kindly eyes and gentle
manners. I was greeted by a woman of eighty-two, with dimmed sight and
dulled hearing, but instantly I recognized some vestiges of the charm
and sweetness of my elder schoolmate of so long ago. No cloud was on her
mind or memory and for an hour we again lived among the old people and
scenes.

What a roomful of pupils, many of them young men and women, there was
during those winters, thirty-five or forty each day! In late years there