I immediately pictured these remote boundaries as a six-foot fence in a good state of preservation, with the Mystic River, the towns of Everett and Revere, and East Boston Creek, rejoicing, on the south, west, north, and east of it, respectively, that they had got inside; while the rest of the world peeped in enviously through a knot hole.

In the middle of this cherished area piano factories--or was it shoe factories ?--proudly reared their chimneys, while the population promenaded on a _rope walk_, saluted at every turn by the benevolent inmates of the Soldiers' Home on the top of Powderhorn Hill.
Perhaps the fault was partly mine, because I always would reduce everything to a picture.

Partly it may have been because I had not had time to digest the general definitions and explanations at the beginning of the book.

Still, I can take but little of the blame, when I consider how I fared through my geography, right to the end of the grammar-school course.

I did in time disentangle the symbolism of the orange revolving on a knitting-needle from the astronomical facts in the case, but it took years of training under a master of the subject to rid me of my distrust of the map as a representation of the earth.
To this day I sometimes blunder back to my early impression that any given portion of the earth's surface is constructed upon a skeleton consisting of two crossed bars, terminating in arrowheads which pin the cardinal points into place; and if I want to find any desired point of the compass, I am inclined to throw myself flat on my nose, my head due north, and my outstretched arms seeking the east and west respectively.
For in the schoolroom, as far as the study of the map went, we began with the symbol and stuck to the symbol.