But pardon my egotism, and I will proceed with my story about Rice Corner.
Does any one wish to know whereabout on this rolling sphere Rice Corner is situated?
I don't believe you can find it on the map, unless your eyes are bluer and bigger than mine, which last they can't very well be.

But I can tell you to a dot where Rice Corner should be.
Just take your atlas--not the last one published, but Olney's, that's the one _I_ studied--and right in one of those little towns in Worcester County is Rice Corner snugly nestled among the gray rocks and blue hills of New England.
Yes, Rice Corner was a great place, and so you would have thought could you have seen it in all its phases, with its brown, red, green, yellow, and white houses, each of which had the usual quantity of rose-bushes, lilacs, hollyhocks, and sunflowers.

You should have seen my home, my New England home, where once, not many years ago, a happy group of children played.

Alas! alas! some of those who gave the sunlight to that spot have left us now forever, and on the bright shores of the eternal river they wait and watch our coming.

I do not expect a stranger to love our old homestead as I loved it, for in each heart is a fresh, green spot--the memory of its own early home--where the sunshine was brighter, the well waters cooler, and the song-bird's carol sweeter than elsewhere they are found.
I trust I shall be forgiven if in this chapter I pause awhile to speak of my home--aye, and of myself, too, when, a light-hearted child, I bounded through the meadows and orchards which lay around the old brown house on my father's farm.