ect, and must be put in a class by itself. The teacher exhibited
my paper before the class, with some remarks about the diligence that
could overtake in a week pupils who had had half a year's start. I
took it all as modestly as I could, never doubting that I was indeed a
very bright little girl, and getting to be very learned to boot. I was
"perfect" in geography, a most erudite subject.

But what was the truth? The words that I repeated so accurately on my
paper had about as much meaning to me as the words of the Psalms I
used to chant in Hebrew. I got an idea that the city of Chelsea, and
the world in general, was laid out flat, like the common, and shaved
off at the ends, to allow the north, south, east, and west to snuggle
up close, like the frame around a picture. If I looked at the map, I
was utterly bewildered; I could find no correspondence between the
picture and the verbal explanations. With words I was safe; I could
learn any number of words by heart, and sometime or other they would
pop out of the medley, clothed with meaning. Chelsea, I read, was
bounded on all sides--"bounded" appealed to my imagination--by various
things that I had never identified, much as I had roamed about the
town. 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 som