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romantic short story that reflected both the popularity of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Plymouth’s skepticism at Puritan sanctimony:
    Many years before the faithful echo of the Lake has answered the crash of timber as some tall giant of the forest fell beneath the pitiless axe of the white settler, a pale-faced maiden had her home beside the murmuring waters. She had been a Puritan but the stern magistrates had banished her from the cold comfort of their fireside because from natural sympathy for suffering she had shown kindness to one of the detested sect of Quakers.
    A shadow hung over their lives: the melancholy Victoria was becoming sicker. One March, on her thirty-ninth birthday, Calvin and Abbie were called to their mother’s bedside. Within an hour she died. “The greatest sorrow” that can come to a boy had come to him, as he later wrote. He took a strand of her hair and preserved it in a locket. From that point on, their grandmother Coolidge, sometimes called Aunt Mede, stepped in, helping to raise both children.
    The death hit the boy hard. He grew taller, thin and quiet. People wondered whether he too might be susceptible to consumption; they agreed that his small features and pale looks recalled his mother and fitted the general stereotype of the consumptive. People noticed him walking back and forth along the way to the cemetery. That was how he might be all his life. After all, the simple school in Plymouth was enough, in those days, to qualify both the children as teachers; Abbie even taught one semester in a neighboring town.
    But even in the period of grief, curiosity stirred in Calvin. John Coolidge and Aunt Mede thought to send the children where they themselves had studied, Black River Academy in Ludlow. On the morning of the first trip to school, it was icy, which meant a fast ride but a cold one. Coolidge and his father climbed into the sleigh while it was still dark. A calf happened to ride with them, going to market in Boston; John admonished his son that the animal would reach the great city now, but the boy would have to wait for years to be ready. Yet Calvin was in good spirits. As they rounded the hill, the light of day struck them. Much later, the boy would recall the ride as magic: “I was perfectly certain that I was travelling out of the darkness into the light.”
    One of the first places the boy inspected in Ludlow was the railroad depot. The depot overlooked a mill; in that town there was noise, not only Central Vermont Railway trains heading back and forth but the noise of the mill and the bells from all the churches. For amusement he would visit the railroad yard, formidable in its scale and noise. It was there that Calvin got a sense of what Plymouth was missing. He wrote of his inspection of a shipment from Canada, “saw a fir tree 24 foot in circumference it was a monster.” The train made everything possible. Marvelously, he found, he could travel by himself to see relatives. Aunt Sarah Pollard lived at a nearby station in Proctorsville. She was his mother’s sister, so it was almost like going home to his mother; his uncle Don ran his own store, and Coolidge could work there, shelving or delivering. Oranges and lemons were making it to that part of the world now, and some fruits were even going to Plymouth, but there was a larger selection in Ludlow. For a time he even worked a job at the Ludlow Toy Manufacturing Company making miniature doll prams or wagons with bright vermilion wheels. The boy put his wages in the Ludlow Savings Bank.
    The school itself was its own illumination, and there were others like it all over New England. The school, Black River Academy, Baptist in background, enjoyed great independence; its head could shape its curriculum and had time to get to know the children. Secondary school was not compulsory: parents contracted with schools and paid them. The schools did not always have dormitories. Coolidge would board with friends or acquaintances and