Beyond the garden was "the field," a vast domain of four acres or
thereabout, by the measurement of after years, bordered to the north by a
fathomless chasm,--the ditch the base-ball players of the present era
jump over; on the east by unexplored territory; on the south by a barren
enclosure, where the red sorrel proclaimed liberty and equality under its
drapeau rouge, and succeeded in establishing a vegetable commune where
all were alike, poor, mean, sour, and uninteresting; and on the west by
the Common, not then disgraced by jealous enclosures, which make it look
like a cattle-market. Beyond, as I looked round, were the Colleges, the
meeting-house, the little square market-house, long vanished; the
burial-ground where the dead Presidents stretched their weary bones under
epitaphs stretched out at as full length as their subjects; the pretty
church where the gouty Tories used to kneel on their hassocks; the
district schoolhouse, and hard by it Ma'am Hancock's cottage, never so
called in those days, but rather "tenfooter"; then houses scattered near
and far, open spaces, the shadowy elms, round hilltops in the distance,
and over all the great bowl of the sky. Mind you, this was the WORLD, as
I first knew it; terra veteribus cognita, as Mr. Arrowsmith would have
called it, if he had mapped the universe of my infancy:
But I am forgetting the old house again in the landscape.
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