Cornelius is deep in town histories these days. He’s always coming up with a fresh insight. The other evening he and Eben were discussing how it was that, despite the hideously poor education in the village schools, so many boys had the ambition to go to Exeter and then Dartmouth, and so many families managed to make it possible for them to do so when it meant not only finding cash, always scarce, but also losing a man from the farm. Yet Willard spawned lawyers and doctors well into the nineties, and those who went off to the cities come back, with remarkable fidelity, on Old Home Day. Eben jokes about it and says they got educated out of sheer desperation, as a way of escape. That’s his story. Cornelius argues that respect for learning was there from the start, came over with the Scotch-Irish. Eben takes the negative, out of a sort of pride, I think. Calls Cornelius sentimental. Deep down he is proud of being a country boy, but he is complex, and sneers more often than not at what he cherishes in his heart. He contends that there’s no vision in villages like this one. They stick to the wrong ideas out of sheer ignorance, won’t vote for zoning because they think it attacks independence, the right to build what one wants where one wants—and so the village will be overrun by trailers before we know it. Eben fought hard to get a zoning law passed when he was selectman, but the hard-headed natives never would go along with him. The exceptional person, Eben insists, has to get out to be able to get a large view of anything at all, from politics to farming. He points out that it’s a stranger to these parts who is experimenting with Scotch Highlander cattle for meat, as his own father did long ago. So maybe I am not wrong to devote my chapter to the ways in which women found a way to escape into the world. I wonder …

Yesterday I took Cathy to see Old Pete in the hospital. He looks well. Amazing how delicate and fine his face looks now he is shaved and one can see it. He is wonderfully cheerful, the pet of all the nurses. But he showed us the terrible swollen black feet and legs, black to the knee. Apparently they hope to save one foot by a new method. It doesn’t look hopeful, alas. Cathy was very silent all the way home. It was more of a shock than I had foreseen for her to see those poor feet.