CHAPTER II
DICK RECEIVES AN INVITATION
Clearfield is a fairly typical New England
mill town, lying some two miles in from
the coast. Doubtless the early settlers had
been attracted by the water power to be derived from
the river which flows around the town on the north.
Certainly, they could not have been influenced by
æsthetic or sanitary considerations, for the town occupies
what must have been in their time a more or
less level meadow a few feet above the river and a
very few more above the sea, and, aside from the
possibility of good drainage—which probably never
occurred to them—those first residents of the future
Clearfield found few natural advantages and little
of the picturesque. To be sure, northward and westward
the country breaks into low hills and is attractive
enough, but a distant view of those hills
