The
cognomen of Crane was not inapplicable to his person. He was
tall, but exceedingly lank, with narrow shoulders, long arms and
legs, hands that dangled a mile out of his sleeves, feet that
might have served for shovels, and his whole frame most loosely
hung together. His head was small, and flat at top, with huge
ears, large green glassy eyes, and a long snip nose, so that it
looked like a weathercock perched upon his spindle neck to tell
which way the wind blew. To see him striding along the profile of
a hill on a windy day, with his clothes bagging and fluttering
about him, one might have mistaken him for the genius of Famine
descending upon the earth or some scarecrow eloped from a
cornfield.
His school-house was a low building of one large room, rudely
constructed of logs, the windows partly glazed and partly patched
with leaves of old copybooks. It was most ingeniously secured at
vacant hours by a withe twisted in the handle of the door and
stakes set against the window-shutters, so that, though a thief
might get in with perfect ease, he would find some embarrassment
in getting out---an idea most probably borrowed by the architect,
Yost Van Houten, from the mystery of an eel-pot. The school-house
stood in a rather lonely but pleasant situation, just at the foot
of a woody hill, with a brook running close by and a formidable
birch tree growing at one end of it.
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