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 dreams and visions, and his heart thumped heavily against his old ribs.  The clock striking ten brought him back to reality.  He stood up with a gesture of exultation almost fierce.  “That’s just the time when the train crosses the State line!” he said.

He slept hardly at all that night, waking with great starts, and imagining himself in strange foreign places, and then recognizing with a scornful familiarity the worn old pieces of furniture in his room.  He noticed at these times that it was very cold, and lifelong habit made him reflect that he would better go early to the church because it would be hard to get up steam enough to warm the building before time for service.  After he had finished his morning chores and was about to start he noticed that the thermometer stood at four above zero.