this six hundred dollars like rain
from the sky. He would start as soon as he could sell his stock.

The thought reminded him of his evening chores, and he set off for the
barn with a fierce jubilation that it was almost the last time he would
need to milk. How far he wondered, could he go on that money? He hurried
through his work and into the house to his old desk. The faded
text-ornament stood on the top shelf, but he did not see it, as he hastily
tumbled out all the time tables and sailing-lists. The habit of looking at
them with the yearning bitterness of unreconciled deprivation was still so
strong on him that even as he handled them eagerly, he hated them for the
associations of years of misery they brought back to him.

Where should he go? He was dazed by the unlimited possibilities before
him. To Boston first, as the nearest seaport. He had taken the trip in his
mind so many times that he knew the exact minute when the train would
cross the State line and he would be really escaped from the net which had
bound him all his life. From Boston to Jamaica as the nearest place that
was quite quite different from Vermont. He had no desire to see Europe or
England. Life there was too much like what he had known. He wanted to be
in a country where nothing should remind him of his past. From Jamaica
where? His stiff old fingers painfully traced out a steamship line to the
Isthmus and thence to Colombia. He knew nothing about that country. All
the better. It would be the more foreign. Only this he knew, that nobody
in that tropical country "farmed it," and that was where he wanted to go.
From Colombia around the Cape to Argentina. He was aghast at the cost, but
instantly decided that he would go steerage. There would be more real
foreigners to be seen that way, and his money would go twice as far.

To Buenos Ayres, then. He did not even attempt to pronounce this name,
though its strange, inexplicable look on the page was a joy to him. From
there by muleback and afoot over the Andes to Chile. He knew something
about that trip. A woman who had taught in the Methodist missionary school
in Santiago de Chile had taken that journey, and he had heard her give a
lecture on it. He was the sexton of the church and heard all the lectures
free. At Santiago de Chile (he pronounced it with a strange distortion of
the school-teacher's bad accent) he would stay for a while and just live
and decide what to do next. His head swam with dre