WHERE I LIVED. 
95 
lar. This is as important as that it keeps butter cool. 
When I looked across the pond from this peak toward 
the Sudbury meadows, which in time of flood I distin¬ 
guished elevated perhaps by a mirage in their seething 
valley, like a coin in a basin, all the earth beyond the 
pond appeared like a thin crust insulated and floated 
even by this small sheet of intervening water, and I was 
reminded that this on which I dwelt was but dry land . 
Though the view from my door was still more con¬ 
tracted, I did not feel crowded or confined in the least. 
There was pasture enough for my imagination. The 
low shrub-oak plateau to which the opposite shore arose, 
stretched away toward the prairies of the West and the 
steppes of Tartary, affording ample room for all the rov¬ 
ing families of men. “ There are none happy in the 
world but beings who enjoy freely a vast horizon,” ■— 
said Damodara, when his herds required new and larger 
pastures. 
Both place and time were changed, and I dwelt nearer 
to those parts of the universe and to those eras in his¬ 
tory which had most attracted me. Where I lived was 
as far off as many a region viewed nightly by astron¬ 
omers. We are wont to imagine rare and delectable 
places in some remote and more celestial corner of the 
system, behind the constellation of Cassiopeia’s Chair, 
far from noise and disturbance. I discovered that my 
house actually had its site in such a withdrawn, but for¬ 
ever new and unprofaned, part of the universe. If it 
were worth the while to settle in those parts near to the 
Pleiades or the Hyades, to Aldebaran or Altair, then I 
was really there, or at an equal remoteness from the life 
which I had left behind, dwindled and twinkling with as 
fine a ray to my nearest neighbor, and to be seen only 
