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