My books, my walks, my visits, as teacher, to many homes, had been so many doors opening on a wider world; so many horizons, one beyond the other.

The boundaries of life had stretched, and I had filled my lungs with the thrilling air from a great Beyond.

Child though I was, Polotzk, when I came back, was too small for me.
And even Vitebsk, for all its peepholes into a Beyond, presently began to shrink in my imagination, as America loomed near.

My father's letters warned us to prepare for the summons, and we lived in a quiver of expectation.
Not that my father had grown suddenly rich.

He was so far from rich that he was going to borrow every cent of the money for our third-class passage; but he had a business in view which he could carry on all the better for having the family with him; and, besides, we were borrowing right and left anyway, and to no definite purpose.
With the children, he argued, every year in Russia was a year lost.
They should be spending the precious years in school, in learning English, in becoming Americans.