Not so very long ago, there was a time of extraordinary beauty here in America. A certain innocence lay in the hearts of many of our young people. A child's life had much hard work in it and much love towards the meadows and orchards and the people who tended them.

If you listen to the wind, you can still hear the songs Americans sang while they cut ice or baled hay. In the distance is the music of the working of the earth, the cracking and sawing of the ice cutter on a winter pond, the melody of the reaper in summer harvest.

Time moved slowly in its own circle then. There was evening enough for a whole family to eat a sit-down supper together every night of the week. Neighbors swapped milk for eggs and shared the year's work and harvest with one another.

We have lost or thrown away so much of this way of life. But our history stays true and fast, like a lantern on the stern of our boat, there to show us where it is we've been. In a remote Vermont village this vanished America once flourished.

Susan Jeffers and I have gone looking for it.

From the dust jacket