Chapter 13 The quadrangle surrounding the Far Common was never considered absolutely essential to the Devon School. The essence was elsewhere, in the older, uglier, more comfortable halls enclosing the Center Common.

Chapter 12 Everyone behaved with complete presence of mind. Brinker shouted that Phineas must not be moved; someone else, realizing that only a night nurse would be at the Infirmary, did not waste time going there but rushed to bring Dr. Stanpole from his house.

Chapter 10 That night I made for the first time the land of journey which later became the monotonous routine of my life: traveling through an unknown countryside from one unknown settlement to another.

Chapter 9 This was my first but not my last lapse into Finny’s vision of peace. For hours, and sometimes for days, I fell without realizing it into the private explanation of the world.

Chapter 8 “I can see I never should have left you alone,” Phineas went on before I could recover from the impact of finding him there, “Where did you get those clothes!”

Chapter 7 Brinker Hadley came across to see me late that afternoon. I had taken a shower to wash off the sticky salt of the Naguamsett River—going into the Devon was like taking a refreshing shower itself, you never had to clean up after it, but the Naguamsett was something else entirely.

Chapter 6 Peace had deserted Devon. Although not in the look of the campus and village; they retained much of their dreaming summer calm. Fall had barely touched the full splendor of the trees, and during the height of the day the sun briefly regained its summertime power.

Chapter 5 None of us was allowed near the infirmary during the next days, but I heard all the rumors that came out of it. Eventually a fact emerged; it was one of his legs, which had been “shattered.”

Chapter 4 The next morning I saw dawn for the first time. It began not as the gorgeous fanfare over the ocean I had expected, but as a strange gray thing, like sunshine seen through burlap.

Chapter 2 Our absence from dinner had been noticed. The following morning—the clean-washed shine of summer mornings in the north country—Mr. Prud’homme stopped at our door.

I went back to the Devon School not long ago, and found it looking oddly newer than when I was a student there fifteen years before