I had a view of Williamstown at the
distance of a few miles,--two or three, perhaps,--a white village and
steeple in a gradual hollow, with high mountainous swells heaving
themselves up, like immense, subsiding waves, far and wide around it. On
these high mountain-waves rested the white summer clouds, or they rested
as still in the air above; and they were formed in such fantastic shapes
that they gave the strongest possible impression of being confounded or
intermixed with the sky. It was like a day-dream to look at it; and the
students ought to be day-dreamers, all of them,--when cloud-land is one
and the same thing with the substantial earth. By degrees all these
clouds flitted away, and the sultry summer sun burned on hill and valley.
As I was walking home, an old man came down the mountain-path behind me
in a wagon, and gave me a drive to the village. Visitors being few in
the Notch, the women and girls looked from the windows after me; the men
nodded and greeted me with a look of curiosity; and two little girls whom
I met, bearing tin pails, whispered one another and smiled.
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