As for Halstead, he was perfectly sure, cock-sure, more than twenty times, what he was going to do in life; but always in the course of a few weeks or months, he discovered he was on the wrong trail.

What can be said of us who either have no vocation at all, or too many?
What are we here for?
In addition to our daily studies at the schoolhouse, we resumed Latin, in the old sitting-room, evenings, Thomas and Catherine Edwards coming over across the field to join us.

To save her carpet, grandmother Ruth put down burlap to bear the brunt of our many restless feet--for there was a great deal of trampling and sometimes outbreaks of scuffling there.
Thomas and I, who had forgotten much we had learned the previous winter, were still delving in _AEsop's Fables_.

But Addison, Theodora and Catherine were going on with the first book of Caesar's _Gallic War_.
Ellen, two years younger, was still occupied wholly by her English studies.

Study hours were from seven till ten, with interludes for apples and pop-corn.
Halstead, who had now definitely abandoned Latin as something which would never do him any good, took up Comstock's _Natural Philosophy_, or made a feint of doing so, in order to have something of his own that was different from the rest of us.