It is his centre; thither he looks for everything.
The place is a little market town, the total of whose population in the census records sounds absurdly small; yet it is a complete world in itself; a capital city, with its kingdom and its ruler, for the territory is practically the property of a single family.

Enter Fleeceborough by whichever route you will, the first object that fixes the attention is an immensely high and endless wall.

If you come by carriage one way, you skirt it for a long distance; if you come the other, you see it as you pass through the narrow streets every now and then at the end of them, closing the prospect and overtopping the lesser houses.

By railway it is conspicuous from the windows; and if you walk about the place, you continually come upon it.

It towers up perpendicular and inaccessible, like the curtain wall of an old fortification: here and there the upper branches of some great cedar or tall pine just show above it.