I left the valley for a visit home, on the last week of the month on Friday night, and started back on foot, a walk of fifteen or twenty miles, on Sunday afternoon, too late for convenience as I discovered in the event. That portion of the valley of the Mohawk, a broad and level plain, is bounded on the west by a range or ranges of hills divided by deep valleys running north and south, perpendicular to the course of the river, and in one of these valleys lay the township of Princeton, in the middle of which was the schoolhouse, the farms of the community being scattered over the hills around, and some of them at distances of a mile or two. It was the head of the glen, and the lay of the land was almost that of an amphitheatre, cannily chosen by the father of the colony, the old Cameronian whose prayers and long services grated so on my New England Puritanism. Before I turned out of the Mohawk valley into that of Princeton, the sun had set, with all the signs of a coming snowstorm, which broke on me suddenly in the glen with a furious north wind tearing down the gorge and drifting the snow as it fell, so that before I had gone a mile with the snow in my face, it was almost impossible to force my way against snow and wind. I wore a long Spanish cloak, such as was much in vogue then and there; wrapping my face in it so that only my eyes were free, I fought on, sometimes only able to walk backward from the cutting cold against my face and eyes, making very slow progress; but it was Sunday night, and the school must be opened at 9 A.M. on Monday. The snow gathered in drifts often up to my middle, with bare, wind-swept spaces between, and these drifts at times were crusted with wind-packed snow too hard to be waded through, and I was obliged to break the snow crust by throwing myself at full length on it. In this way I struggled on till ten at night, when I came to a solitary house by the roadside, at which I stopped to ask a night's lodging, for I could fight the weather no longer. The house was dark and the family asleep, but I was admitted. The bed given me was as cold as the snow outside, but it was luxury compared to some of the quarters I had in my school district. At one of the houses at which I had to take my turn, I remember that there had been, as an afterthought of the house architect, a door cut between the room I slept in and the farmyard, but, whether from indifference or inability, the door had never been put in, and a curtain which supplied its place and was intended to keep the snow out, did it so incompletely that I found in the morning--after a snowy night--that a heavy drift had formed between the opening and the bed. In this room, too, I shared the bed of the hired man, who was paid the same wages as mine, and in the eyes of the community was therefore in every way my equal.