THE eighteen eighties were going well when Calvin Coolidge came out
from Plymouth Notch and took his first real peek into the wide world.
He came down the mountain twelve miles to Ludlow. Not that he had
never journeyed so far from home before. He had been to Woodstock
once or twice, fifteen miles, to see a circus, and with his lawmaking father
the lad had gone to Montpelier and to Rutland, decent Vermont towns
which to the child seemed like busy cities. But this trip in the mid-eighties
was no casual day's journey. Boys and girls a year or so older than he were
teaching school in those parts in those days. Colonel John Coolidge, coun-
try squire and local statesman, his own groom and footman, drove his son,
Calvin, to Ludlow to enroll him in Black River Academy. It was a mo-
mentous journey. Important preparations preceded it. In a motherless
home these preparations were difficult. New clothing was provided, as also
were school texts and such impedimenta as young boys take on their school
journeys. Miss Chamberlain, the hired girl, had done her motherly best
to outfit the boy. And the father, being proud of him, contributed what
he could without appearing prodigal. The two rode down from Plymouth
to Ludlow in the Coolidge farm wagon.

More than forty years after, the boy wrote that the preparations and
packing required more time and attention than he spent collecting his be-
longings when leaving the White House. His whole outfit went into two
small handbags. And he remembers the winter snow lying on the ground
in October. ¹

"I was casting off what I thought was the drudgery of farm life sym-

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