e ^Hills 
 Of q-lingha 
 
 alias Lgije Sharp 
 
THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 PRESENTED BY 
 
 PROF. CHARLES A. KOFOID AND 
 MRS. PRUDENCE W. KOFOID 
 
Dallas lore 
 
 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM. 
 
 WHERE ROLLS THE OREGON. Illustrated. 
 
 THE FACE OF THE FIELDS. 
 
 THE LAY OF THE LAND. 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
THE 
 
 HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 BY 
 
 DALLAS LORE SHARP 
 
 WITH ILLUSTRATIONS 
 
 ^ ^. 
 
 "*-*. ^^ 
 
 BOSTON AND NEW YORK 
 
 HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY 
 
 re?$ Cambribge 
 1916 
 
COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP 
 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED 
 
 Published April iqib 
 
n 
 
 VJ 
 
 I 
 
 TO THOSE WHO 
 Enforst to seek some shelter nigh at hand" 
 
 HAVE FOUND THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 M3752GS 
 
PREFACE 
 
 HIS is not exactly the book I 
 thought it was going to be 
 though I can say the same of its au 
 thor for that matter. I had intended 
 this book to set forth some features of the Earth 
 that make it to be preferred to Heaven as a 
 place of present abode, and to note in detail the 
 peculiar attractions of Hingham over Boston, 
 say, Boston being quite the best city on the 
 Earth to live in. I had the book started under 
 the title "And this Our Life" 
 
 . . . exempt from public haunt, 
 Finds tongues in trees," 
 
 when, suddenly, war broke out, the gates of 
 Hell swung wide open into Belgium, and Heaven 
 began to seem the better place. Meanwhile, a 
 series of lesser local troubles had been brewing 
 drouth, caterpillars, rheumatism, increased com 
 mutation rates, more college themes, more 
 than I could carry back and forth to Hingham, 
 
 so that as the writing went on Boston began 
 
viii PREFACE 
 
 to seem, not a better place than Hingham, but 
 a nearer place, somehow, and more thoroughly 
 sprayed. 
 
 And all this time the book on Life that I 
 thought I was writing was growing chapter by 
 chapter into a defense of that book a defense 
 of Life my life here by my fireside with my 
 boys and Her, and the garden and woodlot and 
 hens and bees, and days off and evenings at 
 home and books to read, yes, and books to write 
 all of which I had taken for granted at twenty, 
 and believed in with a beautiful faith at thirty, 
 when I moved out here into what was then an 
 uninfected forest. 
 
 That was the time to have written the book 
 that I had intended this one to be while the 
 adventure in contentment was still an adven 
 ture, while the lure of the land was of fourteen 
 acres yet unexplored, while back to the soil 
 meant exactly what the seed catalogues picture 
 it, and my summer in a garden had not yet 
 passed into its frosty fall. Instead, I have done 
 what no writer ought to do, what none ever did 
 before, unless Jacob wrote, taken a fourteen- 
 year-old enthusiasm for my theme, to find the 
 
PREFACE ix 
 
 enthusiasm grown, as Rachel must have grown 
 by the time Jacob got her, into a philosophy, 
 and like all philosophies, in need of defense. 
 
 What men live by is an interesting specula 
 tive question, but what men live on, and where 
 they can live, with children to bring up, and 
 their own souls to save, is an intensely prac 
 tical question which I have been working at these 
 fourteen years here in the Hills of Hingham. 
 
CONTENTS 
 
 I. THE HILLS OF HINGHAM I 
 
 II. THE OPEN FIRE ....... a6 
 
 III. THE ICE CROP . . . . , . . .36 
 
 IV. SEED CATALOGUES . . . . . . 46 
 
 V. THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER . . . . . .59 
 
 VI. SPRING PLOUGHING 84 
 
 VII. MERE BEANS . 93 
 
 VIII. A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE .... 109 
 
 IX. THE HONEY FLOW ....... izi 
 
 X. A PAIR OF PIGS .130 
 
 XI. LEAFING 141 
 
 XII. THE LITTLE FOXES . ... * . 150 
 
 XIII. OUR CALENDAR 171 
 
 XIV. THE FIELDS OF FODDER 181 
 
 XV. GOING BACK TO TOWN 197 
 
 XVI. THE CHRISTMAS TREE . . ai6 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 " As Surrey hills to mountains grew 
 In White of Selborne s loving view " 
 
 EALLY there are no hills in Hing- 
 ham, to speak of, except Bradley 
 Hill and Peartree Hill and Turkey 
 Hill, and Otis and Planter s and 
 Prospect Hills, Hingham being more noted for 
 its harbor and plains. Everybody has heard of 
 Hingham smelts. Mullein Hill is in Hingham, 
 too, but Mullein Hill is only a wrinkle on the 
 face of Liberty Plain, which accounts partly for 
 our having it. Almost anybody can have a hill 
 in Hingham who is content without elevation, 
 a surveyor s term as applied to hills, and a purely 
 accidental property which is not at all essential 
 
2 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 to real hillness, or the sense of height. We have 
 a stump on Mullein Hill for height. A hill in 
 Hingham is not only possible, but even practi 
 cal as compared with a Forest in Arden, Arden 
 being altogether too far from town ; besides 
 " ... there s no clock in the forest" 
 
 and we have the 8.35 train to catch of a winter 
 morning ! 
 
 "A sheep-cote fenced about with olive trees" 
 
 sounds more pastoral than apple trees around a 
 house on a hill in Hingham, and it would be 
 more ideal, too, if New England weather were 
 not so much better adapted to apples, and if one 
 did not prefer apples, and if one could raise a 
 family in a sheep-cote. 
 
 We started in the sheep-cote, back yonder 
 when all the world was twenty or thereabouts, 
 and when every wild-cherry-bush was an olive 
 tree. But one day the tent caterpillar like a wolf 
 swept down on our fold of cherry-bushes and we 
 fled Arden, never to get back. We lived for a time 
 in town and bought olives in bottles, stuffed ones 
 sometimes, then we got a hill in Hingham, just 
 this side of Arden, still buying our olives, but 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 3 
 
 not our apples now, nor our peaches, nor our musk 
 melons, nor our wood for the open fire. We buy 
 commutation tickets, and pay dearly for the trips 
 back and forth. But we could n t make a living 
 in Arden. Our hill in Hingham is a compromise. 
 Only folk of twenty and close to twenty live 
 in Arden. We are forty now and no longer poets. 
 When we are really old and our grasshoppers 
 become a burden, we may go back to town where 
 the insects are an entirely different species ; but for 
 this exceedingly busy present, between our fading 
 dawn of visions and our coming dusk of dreams, 
 a hill in Hingham, though a compromise, is an 
 almost strategic position, Hingham being more 
 or less of an escape from Boston, and the hill, 
 though not in the Forest of Arden, something of 
 an escape from Hingham, a quaint old village 
 of elm-cooled streets and gentle neighbors. Not 
 that we hate Boston, nor that we pass by on the 
 other side in Hingham. We gladly pick our 
 neighbors up and set them in our motor car and 
 bring them to the foot of the hill. We people of 
 the hills do not hate either crowds or neighbors. 
 We are neighbors ourselves and parts of the city 
 crowds too; and we love to bind up wounds and 
 
4 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 bring folk to their inns. But we cannot take them 
 farther, for there are no inns out here. We leave 
 them in Hingham and journey on alone into a 
 region where neither thief nor anyone infests the 
 roadsides; where there are no roads in fact, but 
 only driftways and footpaths through the sparsely 
 settled hills. 
 
 We leave the crowd on the streets, we leave 
 the kind neighbor at his front gate, and travel on, 
 not very far, but on alone into a wide quiet coun 
 try where we shall have a chance, perhaps, of 
 meeting with ourselves the day s great adven 
 ture, and far to find; yet this is what we have 
 come out to the hills for. 
 
 Not for apples nor wood fires have we a hill 
 in Hingham; not for hens and a bigger house, 
 and leisure, and conveniences, and excitements; 
 not for ways to earn a living, nor for ways to 
 spend it. Stay in town for that. There " you can 
 even walk alone without being bored. No long, 
 uneventful stretches of bleak, wintry landscape, 
 where nothing moves, not even the train of 
 thought. No benumbed and self-centered trees 
 holding out "pathetic frozen branches for sym 
 pathy. Impossible to be introspective here. Fall 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 5 
 
 into a brown or blue study and you are likely to 
 be run over. Thought is brought to the surface 
 by mental massage. No time to dwell upon your 
 beloved self. So many more interesting things to 
 think about. And the changing scenes unfold 
 more rapidly than a moving-picture reel." 
 
 This sounds much more interesting than the 
 country. And it is more interesting, Broadway 
 asking nothing of a country lane for excitement. 
 And back they go who live on excitement; 
 while some of us take this same excitement as 
 the best of reasons for double windows and storm 
 doors and country life the year through. 
 
 You can think in the city, but it is in spite of 
 the city. Gregariousness and individuality do not 
 abide together; nor is external excitement the 
 cause or the concomitant of thought. In fact this 
 44 mental massage " of the city is to real thinking 
 about what a mustard-plaster is to circulation a 
 counter-irritant. The thinker is one who finds him 
 self (quite impossible on Broadway !) ; and then 
 finds himself interesting more interesting than 
 Broadway another impossibility within the city 
 limits. Only in the country can he do that, in a 
 wide and negative environment of quiet, room, 
 
6 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 and isolation necessary conditions for the en 
 joyment of one s own mind. Thought is a coun 
 try product and comes in to the city for distribu 
 tion, as books are gathered and distributed by 
 libraries, but not written in libraries. It is against 
 the wide, drab background of the country that 
 thought most naturally reacts, thinking being only 
 the excitement of a man discovering himself, as 
 he is compelled to do, where bending horizon 
 and arching sky shift as he shifts in all creation s 
 constant endeavor to swing around and center on 
 him. Nothing centers on him in the city, where 
 he thinks by "mental massage" through the 
 scalp with laying on of hands, as by benediction 
 or shampoo. 
 
 But for the busy man, say of forty, are the 
 hills of Hingham with their adventure possible? 
 Why, there is nothing ailing the man of forty 
 except that he now is neither young nor old, nor 
 rich, the chances are; nor a dead failure either, 
 but just an average man; yet he is one of God s 
 people, if the Philistines were (He brought them 
 from Caphtor) and the Syrians (those He brought 
 from Kir). The man of forty has a right to so much 
 of the Promised Land as a hill in Hingham. 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 7 
 
 But he is afraid to possess it because it is so far 
 from work and friends and lighted streets. He is 
 afraid of the dark and of going off to sit down 
 upon a stump for converse with himself. He is 
 afraid he won t get his work done. If his work 
 were planting beans, he would get none planted 
 surely while on the stump ; but so he might be 
 saved the ungracious task of giving away his 
 surplus beans to bean-ridden friends for the sum 
 mer. A man, I believe, can plant too many beans. 
 He might not finish the freshman themes either. 
 But when was the last freshman theme ever 
 done? Finish them if he can, he has only baked 
 the freshmen into sophomores, and so emptied 
 the ovens for another batch of dough. He shall 
 never put a crust on the last freshman, and not 
 much of a crust on the last sophomore either, the 
 Almighty refusing to cooperate with him in the 
 baking. Let him do the best he can, not the most 
 he can, and quit for Hingham and the hills where 
 he can go out to a stump and sit down. 
 
 College students also are a part of that world 
 which can be too much with us, cabbages, too, if 
 we are growing cabbages. We don t do over 
 much, but we are over-busy. We want too much. 
 
8 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 Buy a little hill in Hingham, and even out here, 
 unless you pray and go apart often to your stump, 
 your desire will be toward every hill in sight and 
 the valleys between. 
 
 According to the deed my hill comprises 
 " fourteen acres more or less " of an ancient gla 
 cier, a fourteen-acre heap of unmitigated gravel, 
 which now these almost fourteen years I have 
 been trying to clear of stones, picking, picking 
 for a whole Stone Age, and planning daily to 
 buy the nine-acre ridge adjoining me which is 
 gravelier than mine. By actual count we dumped 
 five hundred cartloads of stones into the founda 
 tion of a porch when making over the house 
 recently and still I am out in the garden pick 
 ing, picking, living in the Stone Age still, and 
 planning to prolong the stay by nine acres more 
 that are worse than these I now have, nine times 
 worse for stones ! 
 
 I shall never cease picking stones, I presume, 
 but perhaps I can get out a permanent injunction 
 against myself, to prevent my buying that neigh 
 boring gravel hill, and so find time to climb my 
 own and sit down among the beautiful moth- 
 infested oak trees. 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 9 
 
 I do sit down, and I thrust my idle hands hard 
 into my pockets to keep them from the Devil who 
 would have them out at the moths instantly an 
 evil job, killing moths, worse than picking stones! 
 
 Nothing is more difficult to find anywhere 
 than time to sit down with yourself, except the 
 ability to enjoy the time after finding it, even 
 here on a hill in Hingham, if the hill is in woods. 
 There are foes to face in the city and floods to 
 stem out here, but let no one try to fight several 
 acres of caterpillars. When you see them coming, 
 climb your stump and wait on the Lord. He is 
 slow ; and the caterpillars are horribly fast. True. 
 Yet I say, To your stump and wait and learn 
 how restful a thing it is to sit down by faith. 
 For the town sprayer is a vain thing. The roof of 
 green is riddled. The rafters overhead reach out 
 as naked as in December. Ruin looks through. 
 On sweep the devouring hosts in spite of arsenate 
 of lead and " wilt " disease and Calasoma beetles. 
 Nothing will avail; nothing but a new woodlot 
 planted with saplings that the caterpillars do not 
 eat. Sit still my soul, and know that when these 
 oak trees fall there will come up the fir tree and 
 the pine tree and the shagbark, distasteful to the 
 
io THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 worms; and they shall be to the Lord for a name, 
 for an everlasting sign that shall not be cut off. 
 
 This is good forestry, and good philosophy 
 a sure handling of both worms and soul. 
 
 But how hard to follow ! I would so like to 
 help the Lord. Not to do my own share only; 
 but to shoulder the Almighty s too, saying 
 
 If it were done when *t is done, then t were well 
 It were done quickly " ; 
 
 and I up and do it. But it does not stay done. 
 I had sprayed, creosoted, cut, trimmed, cemented, 
 only to see the trees die, until I was forced to rest 
 upon the stump, when I saw what I had been 
 blind to before: that the pine trees were tipped 
 with cones, and that there in the tops were the 
 red squirrels shucking and giving the winged 
 seeds to the winds to sow; and that even now up 
 the wooded slope below me, where the first of 
 the old oaks had perished, was climbing a future 
 grove of seedling pines. 
 
 The forests of Arden are not infested with 
 gypsy moths, nor the woods of Heaven either, I 
 suppose; but the trees in the hills of Hingham 
 are. And yet they are the trees of the Lord ; the 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM n 
 
 moths are his also, and the caring for them. I am 
 caring for a few college freshmen and my soul. I 
 shall go forth to my work until the evening. The 
 Lord can take the night-shift; for it was He who 
 instituted the twilight, and it is He who must 
 needs be responsible till the morning. 
 
 So here a-top my stump in the beleaguered 
 woodlot I sit with idle hands, and no stars fall 
 ing, and the universe turning all alone ! 
 
 To wake up at forty a factory hand! a floor 
 walker! a banker! a college professor! a man 
 about town or any other respectably successful, 
 humdrum, square wooden peg-of-a-thing in a 
 square tight hole! There is an evil* says the 
 Preacher, which I have seen under the sun the 
 man of about forty who has become moderately 
 successful and automatic, but who has not, and 
 now knows he cannot, set the world on fire. This 
 is a vanity and it is an evil disease. 
 
 From running the universe at thirty the man 
 of forty finds himself running with it, paced be 
 fore, behind, and beside, by other runners and by 
 the very stars in their courses. He has struck the 
 universal gait, a strong steady stride that will 
 carry him to the finish, but not among the medals. 
 
12 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 This is an evil thing. Forty is a dangerous age. 
 The wild race of twenty, the staggering step of 
 eighty, are full of peril, but not so deadly as the 
 even, mechanical going of forty; for youth has 
 the dash in hand; old age has ceased to worry 
 and is walking in; while the man of forty is 
 right in the middle of the run, grinding along 
 on his second wind with the cheering all ahead 
 of him. 
 
 In fact, the man of forty finds himself half 
 way across the street with the baby carriage in 
 his hands, and touring cars in front of him, and 
 limousines behind him, and the hand-of-the- 
 law staying and steadying him on his perilous 
 course. 
 
 Life may be no busier at forty than at thirty, 
 but it is certainly more expensive. Work may 
 not be so hard, but the facts of life are a great 
 deal harder, the hardest, barest of them being the 
 here-and-now of all things, the dead levelness of 
 forty an irrigated plain that has no hill of vis 
 ion, no valley of dream. But it may have its hill 
 in Hingham with a bit of meadow down below. 
 
 Mullein Hill is the least of all hills, even with 
 the added stump; but looking down through 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 13 
 
 the trees I can see the gray road, and an occa 
 sional touring car, like a dream, go by ; and off on 
 the Blue Hills of Milton higher hills than ours 
 in Hingham hangs a purple mist that from 
 our ridge seems the very robe and veil of vision. 
 
 The realities are near enough to me here crawl 
 ing everywhere, indeed ; but close as I am to the 
 flat earth I can yet look down at things at the 
 road and the passing cars ; and off at things 
 the hills and the distant horizon ; and so I can 
 escape for a time that level stare into the face of 
 things which sees them as things close and real, 
 but seldom as life, far off and whole. 
 
 Perhaps I have never seen life whole ; I may 
 need a throne and not a hill and a stump for that ; 
 but here in the wideness of the open skies, in the 
 sweet quiet, in the hush that often fills these 
 deep woods, I sometimes see life free, not free 
 from men and things, but unencumbered, com 
 ing to meet me out of the morning and passing 
 on with me toward the sunset until, at times, the 
 stepping westward, the uneventful onwardness 
 of life has 
 
 "... seemed to be 
 A kind of heavenly destiny" 
 
14 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 and, even the back-and-forth of it, a divine 
 thing. 
 
 This knowledge is too wonderful for me; I 
 cannot keep fast hold of it; yet to know occa 
 sionally that you are greater than your rhetoric, or 
 your acres of stones, or your woods of worms, 
 worms that may destroy your trees though you 
 spray, is to steady and establish your soul, and 
 vastly to comfort it ! 
 
 To be greater than your possessions, than your 
 accomplishments, than your desires greater 
 than you know, than anybody at home knows or 
 will admit! So great that you can leave your 
 plough in the furrow, that you can leave the 
 committees to meet, and the trees to fall, and the 
 sun to hurry on, while you take your seat upon 
 a stump, assured from many a dismaying obser 
 vation that the trees will fall anyhow, that the 
 sun will hasten on its course, and that the com 
 mittees, even the committees, will meet and do 
 business whether you attend or not ! 
 
 This is bed-rock fact, the broad and solid bot 
 tom for a cheerful philosophy. To know that they 
 can get on without you (more knowledge than 
 many ever attain !) is the beginning of wisdom ; 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 15 
 
 and to learn that you can get on without them 
 at the close of the day, and out here on your hill 
 in Hingham this is the end of understanding. 
 
 If I am no more than the shoes I stitch, or the 
 lessons I peg, and the college can so calmly move 
 on without me, how small I am ! Let me hope 
 that I am useful there, and useful as a citizen-at- 
 large ; but I know that I am chiefly and utterly 
 dispensable at large, everywhere at large, even 
 in Hingham. But not here on my hilltop. Here 
 I am indispensable. In the short shift from my 
 classroom, from chair to hill, from doing to being, 
 I pass from a means into an end, from a part in the 
 scheme of things to the scheme of things itself. 
 
 Here stands my hill on the highway from 
 dawn to dusk, and just where the bending walls 
 of the sky center and encircle it. This is not 
 only a large place, with room and verge enough ; 
 it is also a chief place, where start the north and 
 south and east and west, and the gray crooked 
 road over which I travel daily. 
 
 I can trace the run of the road from my stump 
 on the hill, off to where it bends on the edge of 
 night for its returning and rest here. 
 
 " Let me live in a house by the side of the road," 
 
16 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 sings the poet ; but as for me, after traveling all 
 day let me come back to a house at the end of 
 the road for in returning and rest shall a man 
 be saved, in quietness and confidence shall he 
 find strength. Nowhere shall he find that quietness 
 and confidence in larger measure than here in the 
 hills. And where shall he return to more rest? 
 
 There are men whose souls are like these hills, 
 simple, strong, quiet men who can heal and re 
 store; and there are books that help like the hills, 
 simple elemental, large books ; music, and sleep, 
 and prayer, and play are healing too ; but none of 
 these cure and fill one with a quietness and con 
 fidence as deep as that from the hills, even from 
 the littlelhills and the small fields and the vast skies 
 of Hingham; a confidence and joy in the earth, per 
 haps, rather than in heaven, and yet in heaven too. 
 
 If it is not also a steadied thinking and a 
 cleared seeing, it is at least a mental and moral 
 convalescence that one gets out of the land 
 scape, out of its largeness, sweetness and reality. 
 I am quickly conscious on the hills of space all 
 about me room for myself, room for the things 
 that crowd and clutter me; and as these arrange 
 and set themselves in order, I am aware of space 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 17 
 
 within me, of freedom and wideness there, of 
 things in order, of doors unlocked and windows 
 opened, through which I look out upon a new 
 young world, new like the morning, young like 
 the seedling pines on the slope young and 
 new like my soul ! 
 
 Now I can go back to my classroom. Now I 
 can read themes once more. Now I can gaze into 
 the round, moon-eyed face of youth and have faith 
 as if my chair were a stump, my classroom a 
 wooded hillside covered with young pines, seed 
 lings of the Lord, and full of sap, and proof 
 against the worm. 
 
 Yet these are the same youth who yesterday 
 wrote the " Autobiography of a Fountain Pen " 
 and " The Exhilarations of the Straw-Ride " and 
 the essays on "The Beauties of Nature." It is I who 
 am not the same. I have been changed, renewed, 
 having seen from my stump the face of eternal 
 youth in the freshmen pines marching up the hill 
 side, in the young brook playing and pursuing 
 through the meadow, in the young winds over 
 the trees, the young stars in the skies, the young 
 moon riding along the horizon 
 
 " With the auld moon in her arm" 
 
i8 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 youth immortal, and so, unburdened by its 
 withered load of age. 
 
 I come down from the hill with a soul resur 
 gent, strong like the heave that overreaches the 
 sag of the sea, and bold in my faith to a lot 
 of college students as the hope of the world ! 
 
 From the stump in the woodlot I see not only 
 the face of things but the course of things, that 
 they are moving past me, over me, and round and 
 round me their fixed center for the horizon to 
 bend about, for the sky to arch over, for the high 
 ways to start from, for every influence and inter 
 est between Hingham and Heaven to focus on. 
 
 "All things journey sun and moon 
 Morning noon and afternoon, 
 Night and all her stars," 
 
 and they all journey about me on my stump in 
 the hilltop. 
 
 We love human nature; we love to get back 
 to it in New York and Boston, for a day, for 
 six months in the winter even, but we need to 
 get back to the hills at night. We are a conven 
 tional, gregarious, herding folk. Let an Amer 
 ican get rich and he builds a grand house in the 
 city. Let an Englishman get rich and he moves 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 19 
 
 straight into the country out to such a spot as 
 Bradley Hill in Hingham. 
 
 There are many of the city s glories and con 
 veniences lacking here on Mullein Hill, but 
 Mullein Hill has some of the necessities that are 
 lacking in the city wide distances and silent 
 places, and woods and stumps where you can sit 
 down and feel that you are greater than anything 
 in sight. In the city the buildings are too vast; the 
 people are too many. You might feel greater than 
 any two or three persons there, perhaps, but not 
 greater than nearly a million. 
 
 No matter how centered and serene I start from 
 Hingham, a little way into Boston and I am lost. 
 First I begin to hurry (a thing unnecessary in 
 Hingham) for everybody else is hurrying; then 
 I must get somewhere ; everybody else is getting 
 somewhere, getting everywhere. For see them in 
 front of me and behind me, getting there ahead 
 of me and coming after me to leave no room for 
 me when I shall arrive ! But when shall I and 
 where shall I arrive*? And what shall I arrive 
 for? And who am I that I would arrive? I look 
 around for the encircling horizon, and up for the 
 overarching sky, and in for the guiding purpose; 
 
20 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 but instead of a purpose I am hustled forward by 
 a crowd, and at the bottom of a street far down 
 beneath such overhanging walls as leave me but 
 a slit of smoky sky. I am in the hands of a 
 force mightier than I, in the hands of the police 
 force at the street corners, and am carried across to 
 the opposite curb through a breaker that rolls in 
 front of me again at the next crossing. So I move 
 on, by external compulsion, knowing, as I move, 
 by a kind of mental contagion, feeling by a sort 
 of proxy, and putting my trust everywhere in 
 advertising and the police. 
 
 Thus I come, it may be, into the Public Li 
 brary, " where is all the recorded wit of the world, 
 but none of the recording," where Shakespeare 
 and Old Sleuth and Pansy look all alike and 
 as readable as the card catalogues, or the boy 
 attendants, or the signs of the Zodiac in the ves 
 tibule floor. 
 
 Who can read all these books? Who wishes 
 to read any of these books ? They are too many 
 more books in here than men on the street out 
 side! And how dead they are in here, wedged 
 side by side in this vast sepulcher of human 
 thought ! 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 21 
 
 I move among them dully, the stir of the streets 
 coming to me as the soughing of wind on the 
 desert or the wash of waves on a distant shore. 
 Here I find a book of my own among the dead. 
 I read its inscription curiously. I must have 
 written it when I was alive seons ago, and far 
 from here. But why did I ? For see the unread, 
 the shelved, the numbered, the buried books ! 
 
 Let me out to the street! Dust we are, not 
 books, and unto dust, good fertile soil, not paper 
 and ink, we shall return. No more writing for me 
 but breathing and eating and jostling with the 
 good earthy people outside, laughing and loving 
 and dying with them ! 
 
 The sweet wind in Copley Square ! The sweet 
 smell of gasoline ! The sweet scream of electric 
 horns ! 
 
 And how sweet how fat and alive and 
 friendly the old colored hack driver, standing 
 there by the stone post ! He has a number on his 
 cap; he is catalogued somewhere, but not in the 
 library. Thank heaven he is no book, but just a 
 good black human being. I rush up and shake 
 hands with him. He nearly falls into his cab 
 with astonishment; but I must get hold of life 
 
22 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 again, and he looks so real and removed from 
 letters! 
 
 " Uncle ! " I whisper, close in his ear, " have 
 ye got it ? Quick 
 
 " Cross me twice wid de raabbit foot 
 Dar J s steppin* at de doo ! 
 Cross me twice wid de raabbit foot 
 Dar s creakin on de floo ! " 
 
 He makes the passes, and I turn down Boylston 
 Street, a living thing once more with face toward 
 the hills of Hingham. 
 
 It is five o clock, and a winter evening, and 
 all the street pours forth to meet me some 
 of them coming with me bound for Hingham, 
 surely, as all of them are bound for a hill some 
 where and a home. 
 
 I love the city at this winter hour. This home- 
 hurrying crowd its excitement of escape! its 
 eagerness and expectancy ! its camaraderie ! The 
 arc-lights overhead glow and splutter with the joy 
 they see on the faces beneath them. 
 
 It is nearly half-past five as I turn into Winter 
 Street. Now the very stores are closing. Work 
 has ceased. Drays and automobiles are gone. 
 The two-wheeled fruit man is going from his 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 23 
 
 stand at the Subway entrance. The street is filled 
 from wall to wall with men and women, young 
 women and young men, fresher, more eager, more 
 excited, more joyous even than the lesser crowd 
 of shoppers down Boylston Street. They don t 
 notice me particularly. No one notices any one 
 particularly, for the lights overhead see us all, 
 and we all understand as we cross and dodge and 
 lockstep and bump and jostle through this deep 
 narrow place of closing doors toward home. Then 
 the last rush at the station, that nightly baptism 
 into human brotherhood as we plunge into the 
 crowd and are carried through the gates and into 
 our train which is speeding far out through the 
 dark before I begin to come to myself find my 
 self leaving the others, separating, individualizing, 
 taking on definite shape and my own being. The 
 train is grinding in at my station, and I drop out 
 along the track in the dark alone. 
 
 I gather my bundles and hug them to me, 
 feeling not the bread and bananas, but only the 
 sense of possession, as I step off down the track. 
 Here is my automobile. Two miles of back- 
 country road lie before me. I drive slowly, the 
 stars overhead, but not far away, and very close 
 
24 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 about me the deep darkness of the woods and 
 silence and space and shapes invisible, and voices 
 inaudible as yet to my city-dinned ears and star 
 ing eyes. But sight returns, and hearing, till soon 
 my very fingers, feeling far into the dark, begin 
 to see and hear. 
 
 And now I near the hill: these are my woods; 
 this is my gravel bank; that my meadow, my 
 wall, my postbox, and up yonder among the 
 trees shines my light. They are expecting me, 
 She, and the boys, and the dog, and the blazing 
 fire, the very trees up there, and the watching 
 stars. 
 
 How the car takes the hill as if up were 
 down, and wheels were wings, and just as if the 
 boys and the dog and the dinner and the fire 
 were all waiting for /*/ / As they are, of course, 
 it and me. I open up the throttle, I jam the 
 shrieking whistle, and rip around the bend in the 
 middle of the hill, puppy yelping down to meet 
 me. The noise we make as the lights flash on, as 
 the big door rolls back, and we come to our 
 nightly standstill inside the boy-filled barn ! They 
 drag me from the wheel puppy yanking at 
 my trouser leg ; they pounce upon my bundles ; 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 25 
 
 they hustle me toward the house, where, in the 
 lighted doorway more welcome waits me and 
 questions, batteries of them, even puppy joining 
 the attack! 
 
 Who would have believed I had seen and 
 done all this, had any such adventurous trip, 
 lived any such significant day, catching my 
 regular 8.35 train as I did ! 
 
 But we get through the dinner and some of 
 the talk and then the out-loud reading before the 
 fire; then while she is tucking the children in 
 bed, I go out to see that all is well about the 
 barn. 
 
 How the night has deepened since my return! 
 No wind stirs. The hill-crest blazes with the 
 light of the stars. Such an earth and sky! I lock 
 the barn, and crossing the field, climb the ridge 
 to the stump. The bare woods are dark with 
 shadow and deep with the silence of the night. 
 A train rumbles somewhere in the distance, then 
 the silence and space reach off through the shad 
 ows, infinitely far off down the hillside ; and the 
 stars gather in the tops of the trees. 
 
II 
 
 THE OPEN FIRE 
 
 T is a January night. 
 
 " Enclosed 
 
 From Chaos and the inroad of Darkness old," 
 
 we sit with our book before the 
 fire. Outside in the night ghostly shapes pass by, 
 ghostly faces press against the window, and at the 
 corners of the house ghostly voices pause for 
 parley, muttering thickly through the swirl and 
 smother of the snow. Inside burns the fire, kin 
 dling into glorious pink and white peonies on 
 the nearest wall and glowing warm and sweet 
 
THE OPEN FIRE 27 
 
 on her face as she reads. The children are in 
 bed. She is reading aloud to me: 
 
 " 1 wish the good old times would come 
 again, she said, when we were not quite so 
 rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor, but 
 there was a middle state so she was pleased 
 to ramble on in which, I am sure, we were 
 a great deal happier. " 
 
 Her eyes left the familiar page, wandering far 
 away beyond the fire. 
 
 " Is it so hard to bear up under two thousand 
 five hundred a year ^ " I asked. 
 
 The gleam of the fire, or perhaps a fancy out 
 of the far-beyond, lighted her eyes as she an 
 swered, 
 
 " We began on four hundred and fifty a year; 
 and we were perfectly " 
 
 " Yes, but you forget the parsonage ; that was 
 rent free ! " 
 
 " Four hundred and fifty with rent free and 
 we had everything we could " 
 
 " You forget again that we had n t even one 
 of our four boys." 
 
 Her gaze rested tenderly upon the little chairs 
 between her and the fire, just where the boys 
 
28 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 had left them at the end of their listening an 
 hour before. 
 
 " If you had allowed me," she went on, " I 
 was going to say how glad we ought to be that 
 we are not quite so rich as " 
 
 " We should like to be ? " I questioned. 
 
 " A purchase J " she was reading again 
 " is but a purchase, now that you have money 
 enough and to spare. Formerly it used to be a 
 triumph. Do you not remember the brown suit, 
 which you made to hang upon you, till all your 
 friends cried shame upon you, it grew so thread 
 bare and all because of that folio Beaumont 
 and Fletcher which you dragged home late at 
 night from Barker s in Covent Garden? Do 
 you remember how we eyed it for weeks before 
 we could make up our minds to the purchase, 
 and had not come to a determination till it was 
 near ten o clock of the Saturday night, when you 
 set off from Islington, fearing 
 
 " Is n t this exactly our case ? " she asked, in 
 terrupting herself for no other purpose than to 
 prolong the passage she was reading. 
 
 "Truly," I replied, trying hard to hide a note 
 of eagerness in my voice, for I had kept my bat- 
 
THE OPEN FIRE 29 
 
 tery masked these many months, "only Lamb 
 wanted an old folio, whereas we need a new car. 
 I have driven that old machine for five years and 
 it was second-hand to begin with." 
 
 I watched for the effect of the shot, but evi 
 dently I had not got the range, for she was say 
 ing, 
 
 "Is there a sweeter bit in all of Elia than 
 this, do you think? 
 
 " 4 And when the old bookseller with some 
 grumbling opened his shop, and by the twink 
 ling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted 
 out the relic from his dusty treasures and 
 when you lugged it home, wishing it were twice 
 as cumbersome ! 
 
 She had paused again. To know when to 
 pause ! how to make the most of your author ! 
 to draw out the linked sweetness of a passage to 
 its longest there reads your loving reader! 
 
 " You see," laying her hand on mine, " old 
 books and old friends are best, and I should 
 think you had really rather have a nice safe old 
 car than any new one. Thieves don t take old 
 cars, as you know. And you can t insure them, 
 that s a comfort ! And cars don t skid and col- 
 
30 ; THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 lide just because they are old, do they? And you 
 never have to scold the children about the paint 
 and and the old thing does go what do you 
 think Lamb would say about old cars?" 
 
 " Lamb be hanged on old cars !" and I sent the 
 sparks flying with a fresh stick. 
 
 44 Well, then let s hear the rest of him on Old 
 China. " And so she read, while the fire burned, 
 and outside swept the winter storm. 
 
 I have a weakness for out-loud reading and 
 Lamb, and a peculiar joy in wood fires when the 
 nights are dark and snowy. My mind is not, after 
 all, much set on automobiles then ; there is such 
 a difference between a wild January night on 
 Mullein Hill and an automobile show or any 
 other show. If St. Bernard of Cluny had been an 
 American and not a monk, I think Jerusalem the 
 Golden might very likely have been a quiet little 
 town like Hingham, all black with a winter night 
 and lighted for the Saint with a single open fire. 
 Anyhow I cannot imagine the mansions of the 
 Celestial City without fireplaces. I don t know 
 how the equatorial people do ; I have never lived 
 on the equator, and I have no desire to nor in 
 any other place where it is too hot for a fireplace, 
 
THE OPEN FIRE 31 
 
 or where wood is so scarce that one is obliged to 
 substitute a gas-log. I wish I could build an open 
 hearth into every lowly home and give every 
 man who loves out-loud reading a copy of Lamb 
 and sticks enough for a fire. I wish is it futile 
 to wish that besides the fireplace and the sticks 
 I might add a great many more winter evenings 
 to the round of the year? I would leave the days 
 as they are in their beautiful and endless variety, 
 but the long, shut-in winter evenings 
 
 "When young and old in circle 
 About the firebrands close * 
 
 these I would multiply, taking them away from 
 June to give to January, could I supply the fire 
 and the boys and the books and the reader to go 
 with them. 
 
 And I often wonder if more men might not 
 supply these things for themselves? There are 
 January nights for all, and space enough outside 
 of city and suburb for simple firesides ; books 
 enough also ; yes, and readers-aloud if they are 
 given the chance. But the boys are hard to get. 
 They might even come girls. Well, what is the 
 difference, anyway ? Suppose mine had been dear 
 
32 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 things with ribbons in their hair not these four, 
 but four more ? Then all the glowing circle about 
 the fireplace had been filled, the chain complete, 
 a link of fine gold for every link of steel! Ah! 
 the cat hath nine lives, as Phisologus saith; but 
 a man hath as many lives as he hath sons, with 
 two lives besides for every daughter. So it must 
 always seem to me when I remember the precious 
 thing that vanished from me before I could even 
 lay her in her mother s arms. She would have 
 been, I think, a full head taller than the oldest 
 boy, and wiser than all four of the boys, being a 
 girl. 
 
 The real needs of life are few, and to be had 
 by most men, even though they include children 
 and an automobile. Second-hand cars are very 
 cheap, and the world seems full of orphans 
 how many orphans now ! It is n t a question of 
 getting the things ; the question is, What are the 
 necessary things*? 
 
 First, I say, a fireplace. A man does well to 
 build his fireplace first instead of the garage. 
 Better than a roof over one s head is a fire at 
 one s feet; for what is there deadlier than the chill 
 of a fireless house ? The fireplace first, unless in- 
 
THE OPEN FIRE 33 
 
 deed he have the chance, as I had when a boy, 
 to get him a pair of tongs. 
 
 The first piece of household furniture I ever 
 purchased was a pair of old tongs. I was a lad in 
 my teens. " Five five five five v-v-v-ve 
 will you make it ten?" I heard the auctioneer 
 cry as I passed the front gate. He held a pair of 
 brass-headed hearth tongs above his head, waving 
 them wildly at the unresponsive bidders. 
 
 "Will you make it ten?" he yelled at me as 
 the last comer. 
 
 " Ten," I answered, a need for fire tongs, that 
 blistering July day, suddenly overcoming me. 
 
 "And sold for ten cents to the boy in the 
 gate," shouted the auctioneer. "Will somebody 
 throw in the fireplace to go with them!" 
 
 I took my tongs rather sheepishly, I fear, 
 rather helplessly, and got back through the gate, 
 for I was on foot and several miles from home. 
 I trudged on for home carrying those tongs with 
 me all the way, not knowing why, not wishing to 
 throw them into the briers for they were very old 
 and full of story, and I was very young and full 
 of I cannot tell, remembering what little boys 
 are made of. And now here they lean against the 
 
34 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 hearth, that very pair. I packed them in the bot 
 tom of my trunk when I started for college ; I 
 saved them through the years when our open fire 
 was a "base-burner," and then a gas-radiator in 
 a city flat. Moved, preserved, "married" these 
 many years, they stand at last where the boy must 
 have dreamed them standing that hot July day, 
 how long, long ago ! 
 
 But why should a boy have dreamed such 
 dreams ? And what was it in a married old pair 
 of brass-headed hearth tongs that a boy in his 
 teens should have bought them at auction and 
 then have carried them to college with him, rat 
 tling about on the bottom of his trunk? For it 
 was not an over-packed trunk. There were the 
 tongs on the bottom and a thirty-cent edition of 
 " The Natural History of Selborne " on the top 
 that is all. That is all the boy remembers. These 
 two things, at least, are all that now remain out 
 of the trunkful he started with from home the 
 tongs for sentiment, and for friendship the book. 
 
 "Are you listening?" she asks, looking up to 
 see if I have gone to sleep. 
 
 " Yes, I m listening." 
 
 "And dreaming?" 
 
THE OPEN FIRE 35 
 
 "Yes, dreaming a little, too, of you, dear, 
 and the tongs there, and the boys upstairs, and 
 the storm outside, and the fire, and of this sweet 
 room, an old, old dream that I had years and 
 years ago, all come true, and more than true." 
 
 She slipped her hand into mine. 
 
 "Shall I go on?" 
 
 " Yes, go on, please, and I will listen and, 
 if you don t mind, dream a little, too, perhaps." 
 
 There is something in the fire and the rise and 
 fall of her voice, something so infinitely sooth 
 ing in its tones, and in Lamb, and in such a night 
 as this so vast and fearful, but so futile in its 
 bitter sweep about the fire that while one lis 
 tens one must really dream too. 
 
Ill 
 
 THE ICE CROP 
 
 HE ice-cart with its weighty tongs 
 never climbs our Hill, yet the ice- 
 chest does not lack its clear blue 
 cake of frozen February. We 
 gather our own ice as we gather our own hay and 
 apples. The small ice-house under the trees has 
 just been packed with eighteen tons of " black " 
 ice, sawed and split into even blocks, tier on tier, 
 the harvest of the curing cold, as loft and cellar 
 are still filled with crops made in the summer s 
 curing heat. So do the seasons overlap and run 
 together ! So do they complement and multiply 
 
THE ICE CROP 37 
 
 each other ! Like the star-dust of Saturn they belt 
 our fourteen-acre planet, not with three rings, nor 
 four, but with twelve, a ring for every month, a 
 girdle of twelve shining circles running round 
 the year the tinkling ice of February in the 
 goblet of October ! the apples of October red 
 and ripe on what might have been April s empty 
 platter! 
 
 He who sows the seasons and gathers the 
 months into ice-house and barn lives not from 
 sunup to sundown, revolving with the hands of 
 the clock, but, heliocentric, makes a daily circuit 
 clear around the sun the smell of mint in the 
 hay-mow, a reminder of noontime passed; the 
 prospect of winter in the growing garden, a gentle 
 warning of night coming on. Twelve times one 
 are twelve by so many times are months and 
 meanings and values multiplied for him whose 
 fourteen acres bring forth abundantly provided 
 that the barns on the place be kept safely small. 
 
 Big bams are an abomination unto the Lord, 
 and without place on a wise man s estate. As birds 
 have nests, and foxes dens, so may any man have 
 a place to lay his head, with a mansion prepared 
 in the sky for his soul. 
 
38 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 Big barns are as foolish for the ice-man as for 
 others. The barns of an ice-man must needs be 
 large, yet they are over-large if he can say to his 
 soul : " Soul, thou hast much ice laid up for many 
 days; eat, drink, and be merry among the cakes " 
 and when the autumn comes he still has a barn 
 full of solid cemented cakes that must be sawed 
 out ! No soul can be merry long on ice nor on 
 sugar, nor shoes, nor stocks, nor hay, nor any 
 thing of that sort in great quantities. He who 
 builds great barns for ice, builds a refrigerator for 
 his soul. Ice must never become a man s only 
 crop; for then winter means nothing but ice; and 
 the year nothing but winter ; for the year s never 
 at the spring for him, but always at February or 
 when the ice is making and the mercury is down 
 to zero. 
 
 As I have already intimated, a safe kind of 
 ice-house is one like mine, that cannot hold more 
 than eighteen tons a year s supply (shrinkage 
 and Sunday ice-cream and other extras provided 
 for). Such an ice-house is not only an ice-house, 
 it is also an act of faith, an avowal of confidence 
 in the stability of the frame of things, and in their 
 orderly continuance. Another winter will come, 
 
THE ICE CROP 39 
 
 it proclaims, when the ponds will be pretty sure 
 to freeze. If they don t freeze, and never do again 
 well, who has an ice-house big enough in that 
 event? 
 
 My ice-house is one of life s satisfactions ; not 
 architecturally, of course, for there has been no 
 great development yet in ice-house lines, and this 
 one was home-done ; it is a satisfaction morally, 
 being one thing I have done that is neither more 
 nor less. I have the big-barn weakness the 
 desire for ice for ice to melt as if I were no 
 wiser than the ice-man! I builded bigger than I 
 knew when I put the stone porches about the 
 dwelling-house, consulting in my pride the archi 
 tect first instead of the town assessors. I took no 
 counsel of pride in building the ice-house, nor 
 of fear, nor of my love of ice. I said : " I will 
 build me a house to carry a year s supply of ice 
 and no more, however the price of ice may rise, 
 and even with the risk of facing seven hot and 
 iceless years. I have laid up enough things 
 among the moths and rust. Ice against the rainy 
 day I will provide, but ice for my children and 
 my children s children, ice for a possible cosmic 
 reversal that might twist the equator over the 
 
40 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 poles, I will not provide for. Nor will I go into 
 the ice business." 
 
 Nor did I ! And I say the building of that 
 ice-house has been an immense satisfaction to 
 me. I entertain my due share of 
 
 " Gorgons, and hydras and chimaeras dire"; 
 
 but a cataclysm of the proportions mentioned 
 above would as likely as not bring on another 
 Ice Age, or indeed 
 
 "... run back and fetch the Age of Gold." 
 
 To have an ice-house, and yourself escape cold 
 storage that seems to me the thing. 
 
 I can fill the house in a single day, and so 
 trade a day for a year; or is it not rather that I 
 crowd a year into a day ? Such days are possi 
 ble. It is not any day that I can fill the ice-house. 
 Ice-day is a chosen, dedicated day, one of the 
 year s high festivals, the Day of First Fruits, the 
 ice crop being the year s earliest harvest. Hay 
 is made when the sun shines, a condition some 
 times slow in coming ; but ice of the right qual 
 ity and thickness, with roads right, and sky right 
 for harvesting, requires a conjunction of right 
 conditions so difficult as to make a good ice-day 
 
THE ICE CROP 41 
 
 as rare as a day in June. June ! why, June knows 
 no such glorious weather as that attending the 
 harvest of the ice. 
 
 This year it fell early in February rather 
 late in the season ; so late, in fact, that, in spite 
 of my faith in winter, I began to grow anxious 
 something no one on a hill in Hingham need 
 ever do. Since New Year s Day unseasonable 
 weather had prevailed: shifty winds, uncertain 
 skies, rain and snow and sleet that soft, spongy 
 weather when the ice soaks and grows soggy. By 
 the middle of January what little ice there had 
 been in the pond was gone, and the ice-house 
 was still empty. 
 
 Toward the end of the month, however, the 
 skies cleared, the wind settled steadily into the 
 north, and a great quiet began to deepen over 
 the fields, a quiet that at night grew so tense 
 you seemed to hear the close-glittering heavens 
 snapping with the light of the stars. Everything 
 seemed charged with electric cold; the rich soil 
 of the garden struck fire like flint beneath your 
 feet ; the tall hillside pines, as stiff as masts of 
 steel, would suddenly crack in the brittle silence, 
 with a sharp report ; and at intervals throughout 
 
42 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 the taut boreal night you could hear a hollow 
 rumbling running down the length of the pond 
 the ice being split with the wide iron wedge 
 of the cold. 
 
 Down and down for three days slipped the 
 silver column in the thermometer until at eight 
 o clock on the fourth day it stood just above 
 zero. Cold ? It was splendid weather ! with four 
 inches of ice on the little pond behind the ridge, 
 glare ice, black as you looked across it, but like a 
 pane of plate glass as you peered into it at the 
 stirless bottom below; smooth glare ice untouched 
 by the wing of the wind or by even the circling 
 runner of the skater-snow. Another day and 
 night like this and the solid square-edged blocks 
 could come in. 
 
 I looked at the glass late that night and found 
 it still falling. I went on out beneath the stars. It 
 may have been the tightened telephone wires 
 overhead, or the frozen ground beneath me ring 
 ing with the distant tread of the coming north 
 wind, yet over these, and with them, I heard the 
 singing of a voiceless song, no louder than the 
 winging hum of bees, but vaster the earth and 
 air responding to a starry lyre as some JEolian 
 
THE ICE CROP 43 
 
 harper, sweeping through the silvery spaces of the 
 night, brushed the strings with her robes of jew 
 eled cold. 
 
 The mercury stood at zero by one o clock. A 
 biting wind had risen and blew all the next day. 
 Eight inches of ice by this time. One night more 
 and the crop would be ripe. And it was ripe. 
 
 I was! out before the sun, tramping down to 
 the pond with pike and saw, the team not likely 
 to be along for half an hour yet, the breaking of 
 the marvelous day all mine. Like apples of gold 
 in baskets of silver were the snow-covered ridges 
 in the light of the slow-coming dawn. The wind 
 had fallen, but the chill seemed the more intense, 
 so silently it took hold. My breath hung about 
 me in little gray clouds, covering my face, and 
 even my coat, with rime. As the hurt passed 
 from my fingers, my eyebrows seemed to become 
 detached, my cheeks shrunk, my flesh suddenly 
 free of cumbering clothes. But in half a minute 
 the rapid red blood would come beating back, 
 spreading over me and out from me, with the 
 pain, and then the glow, of life, of perfect life 
 that seemed itself to feed upon the consuming 
 cold. 
 
44 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 No other living thing was yet abroad, no stir or 
 sound except the tinkling of tiny bells all about 
 me that were set to swinging as I moved along. 
 The crusted snow was strewn with them ; every 
 twig was hung, and every pearl-bent grass blade. 
 Then off through the woods rang the chime of 
 louder bells, sleigh bells; then the shrill squeal 
 of iron runners over dry snow ; then the broken 
 voices of men; and soon through the winding 
 wood road came the horses, their bay coats white, 
 as all things were, with the glittering dust of the 
 hoar frost. 
 
 It was beautiful work. The mid-afternoon 
 found us in the thick of a whirling storm, the 
 grip of the cold relaxed, the woods abloom with 
 the clinging snow. But the crop was nearly in. 
 High and higher rose the cold blue cakes within 
 the ice-house doors until they touched the rafter 
 plate. 
 
 It was hard work. The horses pulled hard; the 
 men swore hard, now and again, and worked 
 harder than they swore. They were rough, simple 
 men, crude and elemental like their labor. It was 
 elemental work filling a house with ice, three 
 hundred-pound cakes of clean, clear ice, cut from 
 
THE ICE CROP 45 
 
 the pond, skidded into the pungs, and hauled 
 through the woods all white, and under a sky all 
 gray, with softly-falling snow. They earned their 
 penny; and I earned my penny, and I got it, 
 though I asked only the wages of going on 
 from dawn to dark, down the crystal hours of 
 the day. 
 
IV 
 SEED CATALOGUES 
 
 HE new number of the Atlantic 
 came to-day," She said, stopping 
 by the table. "It has your essay 
 in it." 
 
 " Yes ? " I replied, only half hearing. 
 " You have seen it, then ? " 
 " No " still absorbed in my reading. 
 " What is it you are so interested in ? " she in 
 quired, laying down the new magazine. 
 " A seed catalogue." 
 
 " More seed catalogues ! Why, you read noth 
 ing else last night." 
 
 "But this is a new one," I replied, "and I de 
 clare I never saw turnips that could touch this 
 
SEED CATALOGUES 47 
 
 improved strain here. I am going to plant a lot 
 of them this year." 
 
 " How many seed catalogues have you had this 
 spring?" 
 
 " Only six, so far." 
 
 " And you plant your earliest seeds " 
 
 " In April, the middle of April, though I may 
 be able to get my first peas in by the last of 
 March. You see peas" she was backing away 
 "this new Antarctic Pea will stand a lot 
 of cold ; but beans do come here, and look at 
 these Improved Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans ! " 
 holding out the wonderfully lithographed page 
 toward her. But she backed still farther away, 
 and, putting her hands behind her, looked at me 
 instead, and very solemnly. 
 
 I suppose every man comes to know that un 
 accountable expression in his wife s eyes soon or 
 late : a sad, baffled expression, detached, remote, 
 as of things seen darkly, or descried afar off; an 
 expression which leaves you feeling that you are 
 afar off, discernible, but infinitely dwindled. 
 Two minds with but a single thought so you 
 start ; but soon she finds, or late, that as the heav 
 ens are high above the earth, so are some of your 
 
48 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 thoughts above her thoughts. She cannot follow. 
 On the brink she stands and sees you, through 
 the starry spaces, drift from her ken in your fleet 
 of seed catalogues. 
 
 I have never been able to explain to her the 
 seed catalogue. She is as fond of vegetables as I, 
 and neither of us cares much for turnips nor for 
 carrots, nor parsnips either, when it comes to that, 
 our two hearts at the table beating happily as one. 
 Born in the country, she inherited a love of the 
 garden, but a feminine garden, the garden parvus, 
 minor y minimus so many cut-worms long, so 
 many cut-worms wide. I love a garden of size, a 
 garden that one cut-worm cannot sweep down 
 upon in the night. 
 
 For years I have wanted to be a farmer, but 
 there in the furrow ahead of me, like a bird on its 
 nest, she has sat with her knitting; and when I 
 speak of loving long rows to hoe, she smiles and 
 says, " For the boys to hoe." Her unit of garden 
 measure is a meal so many beet seeds for a 
 meal ; so many meals for a row, with never two 
 rows of anything, with hardly a full-length row 
 of anything, and with all the rows of different 
 lengths, as if gardening were a sort of geometry 
 
SEED CATALOGUES 49 
 
 or a problem in arithmetic, figuring your vege 
 table with the meal for a common divisor how 
 many times it will go into all your rows without 
 leaving a remainder ! 
 
 Now I go by the seed catalogue, planting, not 
 after the dish, as if my only vision were a garden 
 peeled and in the pot, but after the Bush., Peck, 
 Qt., Pt., Lb., Oz., Pkg., so many pounds to 
 the acre, instead of so many seeds to the meal. 
 
 And I have tried to show her that gardening is 
 something of a risk, attended by chance, and 
 no such exact science as dressmaking; that you 
 cannot sow seeds as you can sew buttons ; that 
 the seed-man has no machine for putting sure- 
 sprout-humps into each of his minute wares as the 
 hook-and- eye-man has; that with all wisdom and 
 understanding one could do no better than to buy 
 (as I am careful to do) out of that catalogue 
 whose title reads "Honest Seeds"; and that even 
 the Sower in Holy Writ allowed somewhat for 
 stony places and other inherent hazards of plant 
 ing time. 
 
 But she follows only afar off, affirming the pri 
 mary meaning of that parable to be plainly set 
 forth in the context, while the secondary meaning 
 
50 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 pointeth out the folly of sowing seed anywhere 
 save on good ground which seemed to be only 
 about one quarter of the area in the parable that 
 was planted; and that anyhow, seed catalogues, 
 especially those in colors, designed as they are 
 to catch the simple-minded and unwary, need to 
 be looked into by the post-office authorities and 
 if possible kept from all city people, and from 
 college professors in particular. 
 
 She is entirely right about the college profes 
 sors. Her understanding is based upon years of 
 observation and the patient cooking of uncounted 
 pots of beans. 
 
 I confess to a weakness for gardening and no 
 sense at all of proportion in vegetables. I can no 
 more resist a seed catalogue than a toper can his 
 cup. There is no game, no form of exercise, to 
 compare for a moment in my mind with having a 
 row of young growing things in a patch of mellow 
 soil ; no possession so sure, so worth while, so in 
 teresting as a piece of land. The smell of it, the 
 feel of it, the call of it, intoxicate me. The rows 
 are never long enough, nor the hours, nor the 
 muscles strong enough either, when there is hoe 
 ing to do. 
 
SEED CATALOGUES 51 
 
 Why should she not take it as a solemn duty 
 to save me from the hoe ? Man is an immoder 
 ate animal, especially in the spring when the 
 doors of his classroom are about to open for 
 him into the wide and greening fields. There is 
 only one place to live, here in the hills of 
 Hingham ; and there is nothing better to do here 
 or anywhere, than the hoeing, or the milking, or 
 the feeding of the hens. 
 
 A professor in the small college of Slimsalary- 
 ville tells in a recent magazine of his long hair 
 and no dress suit, and of his wife s doing the 
 washing in order that they might have bread and 
 the "Eugenic Review" on a salary of twelve 
 hundred dollars a year. It is a sad story, in the 
 midst of which he exclaims : " I may even get 
 to the place where I can spare time (italics mine) 
 to keep chickens or a cow, and that would help 
 immensely ; but I am so constituted that chickens 
 or a cow would certainly cripple my work." How 
 cripple it*? Isn t it his work to teach? Far from 
 it. " Let there be light," he says at the end of 
 the essay, is his work, and he adds that he has 
 been so busy with it that he is on the verge of 
 a nervous break-down. Of course he is. Who 
 
52 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 would n t be with that job ? And of course he 
 has n t a constitution for chickens and a cow. But 
 neither does he seem to have constitution enough 
 for the light-giving either, being ready to collapse 
 from his continuous shining. 
 
 But is n t this the case with many of us ? Are n t 
 we overworking doing our own simple job of 
 teaching and, besides that, taking upon ourselves 
 the Lord s work of letting there be light ? 
 
 I have come to the conclusion that there might 
 not be any less light were the Lord allowed to 
 do his own shining, and that probably there 
 might be quite as good teaching if the teacher 
 stuck humbly to his desk, and after school kept 
 chickens and a cow. The egg-money and cream 
 " would help immensely," even the Professor ad 
 mits, the Professor s wife fully concurring no 
 doubt. 
 
 Don t we all take ourselves a little seriously 
 we college professors and others ? As if the Lord 
 could not continue to look after his light, if we 
 looked after our students ! It is only in these last 
 years that I have learned that I can go forth unto 
 my work and to my labor until the evening, 
 quitting then, and getting home in time to feed 
 
SEED CATALOGUES 53 
 
 the chickens and milk the cow. I am a profes 
 sional man, and I dwell in the midst of pro 
 fessional men, all of whom are inclined to help 
 the Lord out by working after dark all of 
 whom are really in dire constitutional need of 
 the early roosting chickens and the quiet, rumi 
 nating cow. 
 
 To walk humbly with the hens, that s the thing 
 after the classes are dismissed and the office 
 closed. To get out of the city, away from books, 
 and theories, and students, and patients, and 
 clients, and customers back to real things, sim 
 ple, restful, healthful things for body and soul, 
 homely domestic things that lay eggs at 70 cents 
 per dozen, and make butter at $2.25 the _j-pound 
 box! As for me, this does "help immensely," 
 affording me all necessary hair-cuts (I don t want 
 the " Eugenic Review "), and allowing Her to 
 send the family washing (except the flannels) to 
 the laundry. 
 
 Instead of crippling normal man s normal work, 
 country living (chickens and a cow) will prevent 
 his work from crippling him keeping him a 
 little from his students and thus saving him from 
 too much teaching; keeping him from reading 
 
54 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 the "Eugenic Review " and thus saving him from 
 too much learning ; curing him, in short, of his 
 " constitution" that is bound to come to some 
 sort of a collapse unless rested and saved by 
 chickens and a cow. 
 
 " By not too many chickens," she would add ; 
 and there is no one to match her with a chicken 
 fried, stewed, or turned into pie. 
 
 The hens are no longer mine, the boys having 
 taken them over ; but the gardening I can t give 
 up, nor the seed catalogues. 
 
 The one in my hands was exceptionally radi 
 ant, and exceptionally full of Novelties and 
 Specialties for the New Year, among them being 
 an extraordinary new pole bean an Improved 
 Kentucky Wonder. She had backed away, as I 
 have said, and instead of looking at the page of 
 beans, looked solemnly at me ; then with some 
 thing sorrowful, something somewhat Sunday-like 
 in her voice, an echo, I presume, of lessons in the 
 Catechism, she asked me 
 
 " Who makes you plant beans? " 
 
 "My dear," I began, "I " 
 
 " How many meals of pole beans did we eat 
 last summer ? " 
 
SEED CATALOGUES 55 
 
 "I don t re " 
 
 "Three just three," she answered. "And I 
 think you must remember how many of that row 
 of poles we picked?" 
 
 "Why, yes, I " 
 
 " Three just three out of thirty poles ! Now, 
 do you think you remember how many bushels 
 of those beans went utterly unpicked ? " 
 
 I was visibly weakening by this time. 
 
 " Three do you think <? " 
 
 " Multiply that three by three-times-three ! And 
 now tell me " 
 
 But this was too much. 
 
 "My dear," I protested, "I recollect exactly. 
 It was " 
 
 "No, I don t believe you do. I cannot trust 
 you at all with beans. But I should like to know 
 why you plant ten or twelve kinds of beans when 
 the only kind we like are limas ! " 
 
 " Why the catalogue advises " 
 
 " Yes, the catalogue advises " 
 
 "You don t seem to understand, my dear, 
 that" 
 
 " Now, why don t I understand ? " 
 
 I paused. This is always a hard question, and 
 
56 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 peculiarly hard as the end of a series, and on a 
 topic as difficult as beans. I don t know beans. 
 There is little or nothing about beans in the his 
 tory of philosophy or in poetry. Thoreau says 
 that when he was hoeing his beans it was not 
 beans that he hoed nor he that hoed beans 
 which was the only saying that came to mind at 
 the moment, and under the circumstances did 
 not seem to help me much. 
 
 " Well," I replied, fumbling among my stock 
 of ready-made reasons, "I really don t 
 know exactly why you don t understand. Indeed, 
 I really don t know that / exactly understand. 
 Everything is full of things that even I can t 
 understand how to explain my tendency to 
 plant all kinds of beans, for instance; or my 
 weakness, as you call it, for seed catalogues; 
 or " 
 
 She opened her magazine, and I hastened to 
 get the stool for her feet. As I adjusted the light 
 for her she said : 
 
 " Let me remind you that this is the night of 
 the annual banquet of your Swampatalk Club ; 
 you don t intend to forego that famous roast beef 
 for the seed catalogues ?" 
 
SEED CATALOGUES 57 
 
 " I did n t intend to, but I must say that litera 
 ture like this is enough to make a man a vege 
 tarian. Look at that page for an old-fashioned New 
 England Boiled Dinner ! Such carrots. Really 
 they look good enough to eat. I think I 11 plant 
 some of those improved carrots; and some of 
 these parsnips ; and some " 
 
 " You had better go get ready," she said, " and 
 please put that big stick on the fire for me, 1 
 drawing the lamp toward her, as she spoke, so 
 that all of its green-shaded light fell over her 
 over the silver in her hair, with its red rose ; over 
 the pink and lacy thing that wrapped her from 
 her sweet throat to the silver stars on her slippers. 
 
 "I m not going to that Club!" I said. "I 
 have talked myself for three hours to-day, attended 
 two conferences, and listened to one address. 
 There were three different societies for the gen 
 eral improving of things that met at the Uni 
 versity halls to-day with big speakers from the 
 ends of the earth. To-morrow night I address The 
 First Century Club in the city after a dinner with 
 the New England Teachers of English Monthly 
 Luncheon Club and I would like to know what 
 we came out here in the woods for, anyhow *? " 
 
58 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 "If you are going " She was speaking 
 calmly. 
 
 "Going where?" I replied, picking up the 
 seed catalogues to make room for myself on the 
 couch. "Please look at this pumpkin! Think of 
 what a jack-o -lantern it would make for the boys! 
 I am going to plant " 
 
 " You 11 be cold," she said, rising and drawing 
 a steamer rug up over me ; then laying the open 
 magazine across my shoulders while giving the 
 pillow a motherly pull, she added, with a sigh of 
 contentment : 
 
 " Perhaps, if it had n t been for me, you might 
 have been a great success with pumpkins or pigs 
 I don t know." 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 
 
 HERE are beaters, brooms andBis- 
 sell s Sweepers ; there are dry-mops, 
 turkey-wings, whisks, and vacuum- 
 cleaners; there are but no matter. 
 Whatever other things there are, and however 
 many of them in the closet, the whole dust- 
 raising kit is incomplete without the Dustless- 
 Duster. 
 
 For the Dustless -Duster is final, absolute. 
 What can be added to, or taken away from, a 
 
60 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 Dustless-Duster ? A broom is only a broom, even 
 a new broom. Its sphere is limited ; its work is 
 partial. Dampened and held persistently down 
 by the most expert of sweepers, the broom still 
 leaves something for the Dustless-Duster to do. 
 But the Dustless-Duster leaves nothing for any 
 thing to do. The dusting is done. 
 
 Because there are many who dust, and because 
 they have searched in vain for a dustless-duster, 
 I should like to say that the Dustless-Duster can 
 be bought at department stores, at those that have 
 a full line of departments at any department 
 store, in fact; for the Dustless-Duster department 
 is the largest of all the departments, whatever the 
 store. Ask for it of your jeweler, grocer, milliner. 
 Ask for " The Ideal," " The Universal," " The 
 Indispensable," of any man with anything to sell 
 or preach or teach, and you shall have it the 
 perfect thing which you have spent life looking 
 for; which you have thought so often to have, 
 but found as often that you had not. You shall 
 have it. I have it. One hangs, rather, in the 
 kitchen on the clothes-dryer. 
 
 And one (more than one) hangs in the kitchen 
 closet, and in the cellar, and in the attic. I have 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 61 
 
 often brought it home, for my search has been 
 diligent since a certain day, years ago, a "Com 
 mencement Day" at the Institute. 
 
 I had never attended a Commencement exer 
 cise before; I had never been in an opera house 
 before ; and the painted light through the roof 
 of windows high overhead, the strains of the 
 orchestra from far below me, the banks of broad- 
 leaved palms, the colors, the odors, the confusion 
 of flowers and white frocks, were strangely thrill 
 ing. Nothing had ever happened to me in the 
 woods like this: the exaltation, the depression, 
 the thrill of joy, the throb of pain, the awaken 
 ing, the wonder, the purpose, and the longing ! It 
 was all a dream all but the form and the face 
 of one girl graduate, and the title of her essay, 
 " The Real and the Ideal." 
 
 I do not know what large and lofty senti 
 ments she uttered ; I only remember the way 
 she looked them. I did not hear the words she 
 read; but I still feel the absolute fitness of her 
 theme how real her simple white frock, her 
 radiant face, her dark hair ! And how ideal ! 
 
 I had seen perfection. Here was the absolute, 
 the final, the ideal, the indispensable! And I 
 
62 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 was fourteen ! Now I am past forty ; and upon 
 the kitchen clothes-dryer hangs the Dustless- 
 Duster. 
 
 No, I have not lost the vision. The daughter 
 of that girl, the image of her mother, slipped 
 into my classroom the other day. Nor have I 
 faltered in the quest. The search goes on, and 
 must go on ; for however often I get it, only to 
 cast it aside, the indispensable, the ultimate, must 
 continue to be indispensable and ultimate, until, 
 some day 
 
 What matters how many times I have had it, 
 to discover every time that it is only a piece of 
 cheesecloth, ordinary cheesecloth, dyed black 
 and stamped with red letters ? The search must 
 go on, notwithstanding the clutter in the kitchen 
 closet. The cellar is crowded with Dustless-Dust- 
 ers, too; the garret is stuffed with them. There 
 is little else besides them anywhere in the house. 
 And this was an empty house when I moved into 
 it, a few years ago. 
 
 As I moved in, an old man moved out, back 
 to the city whence a few years before he had 
 come ; and he took back with him twelve two- 
 horse wagon-loads of Dustless-Dusters. He had 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 63 
 
 spent a long life collecting them, and now, having 
 gathered all there were in the country, he was 
 going back to the city, in a last pathetic, a last 
 heroic, effort to find the one Dustless-Duster 
 more. 
 
 It was the old man s twelve two-horse loads 
 that were pathetic. There were many sorts of 
 things in those twelve loads, of many lands, of 
 many dates, but all of one stamp. The mark was 
 sometimes hard to find, corroded sometimes nearly 
 past deciphering, yet never quite gone. The red 
 letters were indelible on every piece, from the 
 gross of antique candle-moulds (against the kero 
 sene s giving out) to an ancient coffin-plate, far 
 oxidized, and engraved "Jones," which, the old 
 man said, as he pried it off the side of the barn, 
 "might come in handy any day." 
 
 The old man has since died and been laid to 
 rest. Upon his coffin was set a new silver plate, 
 engraved simply and truthfully, " Brown." 
 
 We brought nothing into this world, and it is 
 certain, says Holy Writ, that we can carry nothing 
 out. But it is also certain that we shall attempt to 
 carry out, or try to find as soon as we are out, a 
 Dustless-Duster. For we did bring something 
 
64 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 with us into this world, losing it temporarily, to 
 be forever losing and finding it; and when we 
 go into another world, will it not be to carry the 
 thing with us there, or to continue there our 
 eternal search for it *? We are not so certain of 
 carrying nothing out of this world, but we are 
 certain of leaving many things behind. 
 
 Among those that I shall leave behind me is 
 The Perfect Automatic Carpet-Layer. But I did 
 not buy that. She did. It was one of the first of 
 our perfections. 
 
 We have more now. I knew as I entered 
 the house that night that something had hap 
 pened; that the hope of the early dawn had died, 
 for some cause, with the dusk. The trouble 
 showed in her eyes: mingled doubt, chagrin, self- 
 accusation, self-defense, defeat familiar symp 
 toms. She had seen something, something perfect, 
 and had bought it. 
 
 I knew the look well, and the feelings all too 
 well, and said nothing. For suppose I had been 
 at home that day and she had been in town"? 
 Still, on my trip into town that morning I ran 
 the risk of meeting the man who sold me " The 
 Magic Stropless Razor Salve." No, not that 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 65 
 
 man ! I shall never meet him again, for venge 
 ance is mine, saith the Lord. But suppose I had 
 met him ? And suppose he had had some other 
 salve, Safety Razor Salve this time to sell ? 
 
 It is for young men to see visions and for old 
 men to dream dreams ; but it is for no man or 
 woman to buy one. 
 
 She had seen a vision, and had bought it 
 " The Perfect Automatic Carpet- Layer." 
 
 I kept silence, as I say, which is often a 
 thoughtful thing to do. 
 
 " Are you ill ? " she ventured, handing me my 
 tea. 
 
 "No." 
 
 "Tired?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 " I hope you are not very tired, for the Par 
 sonage Committee brought the new carpet this 
 afternoon, and I have started to put it down. I 
 thought we would finish it this evening. It won t 
 be any work at all for you, for I I bought 
 you one of these to-day to put it down with," 
 pushing an illustrated circular across the table 
 toward me. 
 
66 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 ANY CHILD CAN USE IT 
 
 THE PERFECT AUTOMATIC CARPET-LAYER 
 
 No more carpet-laying bills. Do your own laying. No 
 wrinkles. No crowded corners. No sore knees. No 
 pounded fingers. No broken backs. Stand up and lay 
 your carpet with the Perfect Automatic. Easy as sweep 
 ing. Smooth as putting paper on the wall. You hold 
 the handle, and the Perfect Automatic does the rest. 
 Patent Applied For. Price 
 
 but it was not the price ! It was the tool a 
 weird hybrid tool, part gun, part rake, part cata 
 pult, part curry-comb, fit apparently for almost 
 any purpose, from the business of blunderbuss to 
 the office of an apple-picker. Its handle, which 
 any child could hold, was somewhat shorter and 
 thicker than a hoe-handle, and had a slotted tin 
 barrel, a sort of intestine, on its ventral side along 
 its entire length. Down this intestine, their points 
 sticking through the slot, moved the tacks in 
 single file to a spring-hammer close to the floor. 
 This hammer was operated by a lever or tongue 
 at the head of the handle, the connection be 
 tween the hammer at the distal end and the lever 
 at the proximal end being effected by means of 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 67 
 
 a steel-wire spinal cord down the dorsal side of 
 the handle. Over the fist of a hammer spread a 
 jaw of sharp teeth to take hold of the carpet. The 
 thing could not talk ; but it could do almost any 
 thing else, so fearfully and wonderfully was it made. 
 
 As for laying carpets with it, any child could 
 do that. But we did n t have any children then, 
 and I had quite outgrown my childhood. I tried 
 to be a boy again just for that night. I grasped 
 the handle of the Perfect Automatic, stretched 
 with our united strength, and pushed down on 
 the lever. The spring-hammer drew back, a little 
 trap or mouth at the end of the slotted tin barrel 
 opened for the tack, the tack jumped out, turned 
 over, landed point downward upon the right 
 spot in the carpet, the crouching hammer sprang, 
 and 
 
 And then I lifted up the Perfect Automatic to 
 see if the tack went in, a simple act that any 
 child could do, but which took automatically and 
 perfectly all the stretch out of the carpet ; for the 
 hammer did not hit the tack; the tack really did 
 not get through the trap; the trap did not open 
 the slot ; the slot but no matter. We have no 
 carpets now. The Perfect Automatic stands in 
 
68 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 the garret with all its original varnish on. At its 
 feet sits a half-used can of " Beesene, The Prince 
 of Floor Pastes." 
 
 We have only hard-wood floors now, which we 
 treated, upon the strength of the label, with this 
 Prince of Pastes, "Beesene" "guaranteed not 
 to show wear or dirt or to grow gritty; water 
 proof, gravel-proof. No rug will ruck on it, no 
 slipper stick to it. Needs no weighted brush. 
 Self-shining. The only perfect Floor Wax known. 
 One box will do all the floors you have." 
 
 Indeed, half a box did all the floors we have. 
 No slipper would stick to the paste, but the paste 
 would stick to the slipper ; and the greasy Prince 
 did in spots all the floors we have : the laundry 
 floor, the attic floor, and the very boards of the 
 vegetable cellar. 
 
 I am young yet. I have not had time to collect 
 my twelve two-horse loads. But I am getting 
 them fast. 
 
 Only the other day a tall lean man came to the 
 side door, asking after my four boys by name, and 
 inquiring when my new book would be off the 
 stocks, and, incidentally, showing me a patent- 
 applied-for device called " The Fat Man s Friend." 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 69 
 
 "The Friend" was a steel-wire hoop, shaped 
 and jointed like a pair of calipers, but knobbed at 
 its points with little metal balls. The instrument 
 was made to open and spring closed about the 
 Fat Man s neck, and to hold, by means of a clasp 
 on each side, a napkin, or bib, spread securely 
 over the Fat Man s bosom. 
 
 "Ideal thing, now, isn t it?" said the agent, 
 demonstrating with his handkerchief. 
 
 "Why yes " I hesitated " for a fat man, 
 perhaps." 
 
 "Just so," he replied, running me over rapidly 
 with a professional eye ; " but you know, Profes 
 sor, that when a man s forty, or thereabouts, it s 
 the nature of him to stouten. Once past forty he s 
 liable to pick up any day. And when he starts, 
 you know as well as I, Professor, when he starts 
 there s nothing fattens faster than a man of forty. 
 You ought to have one of these Friends on 
 hand." 
 
 "But fat does n t run in my family," I pro 
 tested, my helpless, single-handed condition being 
 plainly manifest in my tone. 
 
 "No matter," he rejoined, "look at me! Six 
 feet three, and thin as a lath. I m what you might 
 
70 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 call a walking skeleton, ready to disjoint, as the 
 poet says, and eat all my meals in fear, which I 
 would do if t wa n t for this little * Friend. I can t 
 eat without it. I miss it more when I am eatin 
 than I miss the victuals. I carry one with me all 
 the time. Awful handy little thing. Now " 
 
 "But " I put in. 
 
 "Certainly," he continued, with the smoothest- 
 running motor I ever heard, "but here s the 
 point of the whole matter, as you might say. 
 This thing is up to date, Professor. Now, the old- 
 fashioned way of tying a knot in the corner of 
 your napkin and anchoring it under your Adam s 
 apple that s gone by. Also the stringed bib 
 and safety-pin. Both those devices were crude 
 but necessary, of course, Professor and incon 
 venient, and that old-fashioned knot really dan 
 gerous; for the knot, pressing against the Adam s 
 apple, or the apple, as you might say, trying to 
 swallow the knot well, if there isn t less apo 
 plexy and strangulation when this little Friend 
 finds universal application, then I m no Prophet, 
 as the Good Book says." 
 
 "But you see " I broke in. 
 
 " I do, Professor. It s right here. I understand 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 71 
 
 your objection. But it is purely verbal and aca 
 demic, Professor. You are troubled concerning 
 the name of this indispensable article. But you 
 know, as well as I even better with your edu 
 cation, Professor that there s nothing, abso 
 lutely nothing in a name. What s in a name *? 
 the poet says. And I 11 agree with you though, 
 of course, it s confidential that The Fat Man s 
 Friend is, as you literary folks would say, more 
 or less of a now de flume. Is n t it ? Besides, 
 if you 11 allow me the language, Professor, 
 it s too delimiting, restricting, prejudicing. Sets 
 a lean man against it. But between us, Professor, 
 they re going to change the name of the next 
 batch. They re " 
 
 "Indeed!" I exclaimed; "what s the next 
 batch going to be *? " 
 
 " Oh, just the same fifteen cents each two 
 for a quarter. You could n t tell them apart. You 
 might just as well have one of these, and run no 
 chances getting one of the next lot. They 11 be 
 precisely the same; only, you see, they re going 
 to name the next ones Every Bosom s Friend/ 
 to fit lean and fat, and without distinction of 
 sex. Ideal thing now, is n t it ? Yes, that s right 
 
72 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 fifteen cents two for twenty-five, Professor? 
 
 don t you want another for your wife ? " 
 
 No, I did not want another for her. But if she 
 had been at home, and I had been away, who 
 knows but that all six of us had come off with 
 a "Friend" apiece? They were a bargain by the 
 half-dozen. 
 
 A bargain ? Did anybody ever get a bargain 
 
 something worth more than he paid ? Well 
 
 you shall, when you bring home a Dustless- 
 Duster. 
 
 And who has not brought it home ! Or who 
 is not about to bring it home ! Not all the years 
 that I have searched, not all the loads that I have 
 collected, count against the conviction that at 
 last I have it the perfect thing until I reach 
 home. But with several of my perfections I have 
 never yet reached home, or I am waiting an op 
 portune season to give them to my wife. I have 
 been disappointed ; but let no one try to tell me 
 that there is no such thing as Perfection. Is not 
 the desire for it the breath of my being ? Is not 
 the search for it the end of my existence? Is 
 not the belief that at last I possess it in my 
 self, my children, my breed of hens, my religious 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 73 
 
 creed, my political party is not this conviction, 
 I say, all there is of existence *? 
 
 It is very easy to see that perfection is not in 
 any of the other political parties. During a po 
 litical campaign, not long since, I wrote to a 
 friend in New Jersey, 
 
 44 Now, whatever your particular, personal brand 
 of political faith, it is clearly your moral duty to 
 vote this time the Democratic ticket." 
 
 Whereupon (and he is a thoughtful, God 
 fearing man, too) he wrote back, 
 
 " As I belong to the only party of real reform, 
 I shall stick to it this year, as I always have, and 
 vote the straight ticket." 
 
 Is there a serener faith than this human faith 
 in perfection *? A surer, more unshakable belief 
 than this human belief in the present possession 
 of it 4 ? 
 
 There is only one thing deeper in the heart 
 of man than his desire for completeness, and that 
 is his conviction of being about to attain unto 
 it. He dreams of completeness by night ; works 
 for completeness by day ; buys it of every agent 
 who comes along ; votes for it at every election ; 
 accepts it with every sermon; and finds it 
 
74 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 momentarily every time he finds himself. The 
 desire for it is the sweet spring of all his satisfac 
 tions; the possession of it the bitter fountain of 
 many of his woes. 
 
 Apply the conviction anywhere, to anything 
 creeds, wives, hens and see how it works out. 
 
 As to bens : 
 
 There are many breeds of fairly good hens, 
 and I have tried as many breeds as I have had 
 years of keeping hens, but not until the poultry 
 show, last winter, did I come upon the perfect 
 hen. I had been working toward her through the 
 Bantams, Brahmas, and Leghorns, to the Plym 
 outh Rocks. I had tried the White and the 
 Barred Plymouth Rocks, but they were not the 
 hen. Last winter I came upon the originator of 
 the Buff Plymouth Rocks and here she was ! 
 I shall breed nothing henceforth but Buff Plym 
 outh Rocks. 
 
 In the Buff Rock we have a bird of ideal size, 
 neither too large nor too small, weighing about 
 three pounds more than the undersized Leghorn, 
 and about three pounds less than the oversized 
 Brahma ; we have a bird of ideal color, too a 
 single, soft, even tone, and no such barnyard 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 75 
 
 daub as the Rhode Island Red; not crow-colored, 
 either, like the Minorca ; nor liable to all the dirt 
 of the White Plymouth Rocks. Being a beauti 
 ful and uniform buff, this perfect Plymouth Rock 
 is easily bred true to color, as the vari-colored 
 fowls are not. 
 
 Moreover, the Buff Rock is a layer, is the layer, 
 maturing as she does about four weeks later than 
 the Rhode Island Reds, and so escaping that fatal 
 early fall laying with its attendant moult and egg- 
 less interim until March ! On the other hand, the 
 Buff Rock matures about a month earlier than 
 the logy, slow-growing breeds, and so gets a good 
 start before the cold and eggless weather comes. 
 
 And such an egg ! There are white eggs and 
 brown eggs, large and small eggs, but only one 
 ideal egg the Buff Rock s. It is of a soft lovely 
 brown, yet whitish enough for a New York mar 
 ket, but brown enough, however, to meet the 
 exquisite taste of the Boston trade. In fact it is 
 neither white nor brown, but rather a delicate 
 blend of the two a new tone, indeed, a bloom 
 rather, that I must call fresh-laid lavender. 
 
 So, at least, I am told. My pullets are not yet 
 laying, having had a very late start last spring. 
 
y6 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 But the real question, speaking professionally, 
 with any breed of fowls is a market question : 
 How do they dress ? How do they eat ? 
 
 If the Buff Plymouth Rock is an ideal bird in 
 her feathers, she is even more so plucked. All 
 white-feathered fowl, in spite of yellow legs, look 
 cadaverous when picked. All dark-feathered fowl, 
 with their tendency to green legs and black pin- 
 feathers, look spotted, long dead, and unsavory. 
 But the Buff Rock, a melody in color, shows 
 that consonance, that consentaneousness, of flesh 
 to feather that makes the plucked fowl to the 
 feathered fowl what high noon is to the faint and 
 far-off dawn a glow of golden legs and golden 
 neck, mellow, melting as butter, and all the more 
 so with every unpicked pinfeather. 
 
 Can there be any doubt of the existence of 
 hen-perfection 9 Any question of my having at 
 tained unto it with the maturing of this new 
 breed of hens ? 
 
 For all spiritual purposes, that is, for all satis 
 factions, the ideal hen is the pullet the Buff 
 Plymouth Rock pullet. 
 
 Just so the ideal wife. If we could only keep 
 them pullets ! 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 77 
 
 The trouble we husbands have with our wives 
 begins with our marrying them. There is seldom 
 any trouble with them before. Our belief in fem 
 inine perfection is as profound and as eternal as 
 youth. And the perfection is just as real as the 
 faith. Youth is always bringing the bride home 
 to hang her on the kitchen clothes-dryer. She 
 turns out to be ordinary cheese-cloth, dyed a 
 more or less fast black this perfection that he 
 had stamped in letters of indelible red ! 
 
 The race learns nothing. I learn, but not my 
 children after me. They learn only after them 
 selves. Already I hear my boys saying that their 
 wives ! And the oldest of these boys has just 
 turned fourteen ! 
 
 Fourteen ! the trouble all began at fourteen. 
 No, the trouble began with Adam, though Eve 
 has been responsible for much of it since. Adam 
 had all that a man should have wanted in his 
 perfect Garden. Nevertheless he wanted Eve. 
 Eve in turn had Adam, a perfect man ! but she 
 wanted something more if only the apple tree 
 in the middle of the Garden. And we all of us 
 were there in that Garden with Adam think 
 ing he was getting perfection in Eve; with Eve 
 
78 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 incapable of appreciating perfection in Adam. 
 The trouble is human. 
 
 " Flounder, flounder in the sea, 
 Prythee quickly come to me! 
 For my wife, Dame Isabel, 
 Wants strange things I scarce dare tell." 
 
 "And what does she want now?" asks the 
 flounder. 
 
 "Oh, she wants to vote now," says the fisher 
 man. 
 
 "Go home, and you shall find her with the 
 ballot," sighs the flounder. " But has n t she Dust- 
 less-Dusters enough already?" 
 
 It would seem so. But once having got Adam, 
 who can blame her for wanting an apple tree 
 besides, or the ballot? 
 
 T is no use to forbid her. Yes, she has you, 
 but but Eve had Adam, too, another per 
 fect man ! Don t forbid her, for she will have it 
 anyhow. It may not turn out to be all that she 
 thinks it is. But did you turn out to be all that 
 she thought you were? She will have a bite of 
 this new apple if she has to disobey, and die for 
 it, because such disobedience and death are in 
 answer J:o a higher command, and to a larger 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 79 
 
 life from within. Eve s discovery that Adam was 
 cheese-cloth, and her reaching out for something 
 better, did not, as Satan promised, make us as 
 God; but it did make us different from all the 
 other animals in the Garden, placing us even 
 above the angels, so far above, as to bring us, 
 apparently, by a new and divine descent, into 
 Eden. 
 
 The hope of the race is in Eve, in her making 
 the best she can of Adam; in her clear understand 
 ing of his lame logic, that her /^perfections 
 added to his perfections make the perfect Perfec 
 tion; and in her reaching out beyond Adam for 
 something more for the ballot now. 
 
 If there is growth, if there is hope, if there is 
 continuance, if there is immortality for the race 
 and for the soul, it is to be found in this sure faith 
 in the Ultimate, the Perfect, in this certain disap 
 pointment every time we think we have it; and 
 in this abiding conviction that we are about to 
 bring it home. But let a man settle down on per 
 fection as a present possession, and that man is 
 as good as dead already even religiously dead, 
 if he has possession of a perfect Salvation. 
 
 Now, " Sister Smith " claimed to possess Per- 
 
8o THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 fection a perfect infallible book of revelations 
 in her King James Version of the Scriptures, and 
 she claimed to have lived by it, too, for eighty 
 years. I was fresh from the theological school, 
 and this was my first " charge." This was my first 
 meal, too, in this new charge, at the home of one 
 of the official brethren, with whom Sister Smith 
 lived. 
 
 There was an ominous silence at the table for 
 which I could hardly account unless it had to 
 do with the one empty chair. Then Sister Smith 
 appeared and took the chair. The silence deep 
 ened. Then Sister Smith began to speak and 
 everybody stopped eating. Brother Jones laid 
 down his knife, Sister Jones dropped her hands into 
 her lap until the thing should be over. Leaning 
 far forward toward me across the table, her steady 
 gray eyes boring through me, her long bony finger 
 pointing beyond me into eternity, Sister, Smith 
 began with spaced and measured words: 
 
 "My young Brother what do you 
 think of Jonah? " 
 
 I reached for a doughnut, broke it, slowly, 
 dipped it up and down in the cup of mustard 
 and tried for time. Not a soul stirred. Not a 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 81 
 
 word or sound broke the tense silence about the 
 operating-table. 
 
 " What do you think of Jonah? " 
 
 "Well, Sister Smith, I" 
 
 "Never mind. Don t commit yourself. You 
 need n t tell me what you think of Jonah. You 
 are too young to know what you 
 think of Jonah. But I will tell you what 
 / think of Jonah : if the Scriptures had said that 
 Jonah swallowed the whale, it would be just as 
 easy to believe as it is that the whale swallowed 
 Jonah." 
 
 "So it would, Sister Smith," I answered 
 weakly, "just as easy." 
 
 "And now, my young Brother, you preach the 
 Scriptures the old genuine inspired Authorized 
 Version, word for word, just as God spoke it!" 
 
 Sister Smith has gone to Heaven, but in spite 
 of her theology. Dear old soul, she sent me many 
 a loaf of her salt-rising bread after that, for she 
 had as warm a heart as ever beat its brave way 
 past eighty. 
 
 But she had neither a perfect Book, nor a per 
 fect Creed, nor a perfect Salvation. She did not 
 need them ; nor could she have used them ; for 
 
82 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 they would have posited a divine command to 
 be perfect a too difficult accomplishment for 
 any of us, even for Sister Smith. 
 
 There is no such divine command laid upon 
 us ; but only such a divinely human need spring 
 ing up within us, and reaching out for everything, 
 in its deep desire, from dust-cloths dyed black to 
 creeds of every color. 
 
 This is a life of imperfections, a world made 
 of cheese-cloth, merely dyed black, and stamped 
 in red letters The Dustless-Duster. Yet a 
 cheese-cloth world so dyed and stamped is better 
 than a cloth-of-gold world, for the cloth-of-gold 
 you would not want to dye nor to stamp with 
 burning letters. 
 
 We have never found it, this perfect thing, 
 and perhaps we never shall. But the desire, 
 the search, the faith, must not fail us, as at times 
 they seem to do. At times the very tides of the 
 ocean seem to fail, when the currents cease 
 to run. Yet when they are at slack here, they 
 are at flood on the other side of the world, turn 
 ing already to pour back 
 
 ". . . lo, out of his plenty the sea 
 Pours fast ; full soon the time of the flood-tide shall be" 
 
THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER 83 
 
 The faith cannot fail us for long. Full soon 
 the ebb-tide turns, 
 
 "And Belief overmasters doubt, and I know that I know" 
 
 that there is perfection ; that the desire for it is 
 the breath of life ; that the search for it is the hope 
 of immortality. 
 
 But I know only in part. I see through a glass 
 darkly, and I may be no nearer it now than when 
 I started, yet the search has carried me far from 
 that start. And if I never arrive, then, at least, 
 I shall keep going on, which, in itself may be the 
 thing the Perfect Thing that I am seeking. 
 
VI 
 SPRING PLOUGHING 
 
 EE-SAW, Margery Daw ! 
 Sold her bed and lay upon straw" 
 the very worst thing, I used to 
 think, that ever happened in Moth 
 er Goose. I might steal a pig, perhaps, like Tom 
 the Piper s Son, but never would I do such a 
 thing as Margery did ; the dreadful picture of 
 her nose and of that bottle in her hand made me 
 sure of that. And yet snore on, Margery ! I 
 sold my plough and bought an automobile ! As 
 if an automobile would carry me 
 
 "To the island-valley of Avilion," 
 
 where I should no longer need the touch of the 
 soil and the slow simple task to heal me of my 
 grievous wound ! 
 
SPRING PLOUGHING 85 
 
 Speed, distance, change are these the cure 
 for that old hurt we call living, the long dull 
 ache of winter, the throbbing bitter-sweet pain 
 of spring? We seek for something different, 
 something not different but faster and still faster, 
 to fill our eyes with flying, our ears with rushing, 
 our skins with scurrying, our diaphragms, which 
 are our souls, with the thrill of curves, and 
 straight stretches, of lifts, and drops, and sudden 
 halts as of elevators, merry-go-rounds, chutes, 
 scenic railways, aeroplanes, and heavy low-hung 
 cars. 
 
 To go up or down, or straight away any 
 way, but round and round, and slowly as if 
 one could speed away from being, or ever travel 
 beyond one s self! How pathetic to sell all that 
 one has and buy an automobile ! to shift one s 
 grip from the handles of life to the wheel of 
 change ! to forsake the furrow for the highway, 
 the rooted soil for the flying dust, the here for 
 the there; imagining that somehow a car is 
 more than a plough, that going is the last word 
 in living demountable rims and non-skid tires, 
 the great gift of the God Mechanic, being the 
 1916 model of the wings of the soul! 
 
86 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 But women must weep in spite of modern 
 mechanics, and men must plough. Petroleum, 
 with all of its by-products, cannot be served for 
 bread. I have tried many substitutes for plough 
 ing; and as for the automobile, I have driven 
 that thousands of miles, driven it almost daily, 
 summer and winter ; but let the blackbirds re 
 turn, let the chickweed start in the garden, then 
 the very stones of the walls cry out " Plough ! 
 plough!" 
 
 It is not the stones I hear, but the entombed 
 voices of earlier primitive selves far back in my 
 dim past; those, and the call of the boy I was 
 yesterday, whose landside toes still turn in, per 
 haps, from walking in the furrow. When that 
 call comes, no 
 
 " Towered cities please us then 
 And the busy hum of men," 
 
 or of automobiles. I must plough. It is the April 
 wind that wakes the call 
 
 " Zephirus eek, with his sweete breeth " 
 
 and many hearing it long to " goon on pilgrim 
 ages," or to the Maine woods to fish, or, waiting 
 until the igth, to leave Boston by boat and go 
 
SPRING PLOUGHING 87 
 
 up and down the shore to see how fared their 
 summer cottages during the winter storms ; some 
 even imagine they have malaria and long for bit 
 ters as many men as many minds when 
 
 " The time of the singing of birds is come 
 And the voice of the turtle is heard in our land." 
 
 But as for me it is neither bitters, nor cottages, 
 nor trout, nor 
 
 "ferae halvves couth in sondry landes " 
 
 that I long for : but simply for the soil, for the 
 warming, stirring earth, for my mother. It is back 
 to her breast I would go, back to the wide sweet 
 fields, to the slow-moving team and the lines 
 about my shoulder, to the even furrow rolling 
 from the mould-board, to the taste of the soil, the 
 sight of the sky, the sound of the robins and blue 
 birds and blackbirds, and the ringing notes of 
 Highhole over the sunny fields. 
 
 I hold the plough as my only hold upon the 
 earth, and as I follow through the fresh and fra 
 grant furrow I am planted with every footstep, 
 growing, budding, blooming into a spirit of the 
 spring. I can catch the blackbirds ploughing, I 
 can turn under with my furrow the laughter of 
 
88 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 the flowers, the very joy of the skies. But if I so 
 much as turn in my tracks, the blackbirds scatter; 
 if I shout, Highhole is silent ; if I chase the 
 breeze, it runs away ; I might climb into the hum 
 ming maples, might fill my hands with arbutus 
 and bloodroot, might run and laugh aloud with 
 the light; as if with feet I could overtake it, could 
 catch it in my hands, and in my heart could hold 
 it all this living earth, shining sky, flowers, 
 buds, voices, colors, odors this spring ! 
 
 But I can plough while the blackbirds come 
 close behind me in the furrow ; and I can be the 
 spring. 
 
 I could plough, I mean, when I had a plough. 
 But I sold it for five dollars and bought a second 
 hand automobile for fifteen hundred as every 
 body else has. So now I do as everybody else 
 does, borrow my neighbor s plough, or still 
 worse, get my neighbor to do my ploughing, be 
 ing still blessed with a neighbor so steadfast and 
 simple as to possess a plough. But I must plough 
 or my children s children will never live to have 
 children, they will have motor cars instead. 
 The man who pulls down his barns and builds a 
 garage is not planning for posterity. But perhaps 
 
SPRING PLOUGHING 89 
 
 it does not matter; for while we are purring city 
 ward over the sleek and tarry roads, big hairy Finns 
 are following the plough round and round our 
 ancestral fields, planting children in the furrows, 
 so that there shall be some one here when we 
 have motored off to possess the land. 
 
 I see no way but to keep the automobile and 
 buy another plough, not for my children s sake 
 any more than for my own. There was an old 
 man living in this house when I bought it who 
 moved back into the city and took with him, 
 among other things, a big grindstone and two 
 long-handled hayforks for crutches, did he 
 think*? and to keep a cutting edge on the scythe 
 of his spirit as he mowed the cobblestones? 
 When I am old and my children compel me to 
 move back near the asylums and hospitals, I shall 
 carry into the city with me a plough ; and I shall 
 pray the police to let me go every springtime to 
 the Garden or the Common and there turn a 
 few furrows as one whom still his mother com- 
 forteth. 
 
 It is only a few furrows that I now turn. A 
 half-day and it is all over, all the land ploughed 
 that I own, all that the Lord intended should be 
 
90 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 tilled. A half-day but every fallow field and 
 patch of stubble within me has been turned up 
 in that time, given over for the rain and sunshine 
 to mellow and put into tender tilth. 
 
 No other labor, no other contact with the earth 
 is like ploughing. You may play upon it, travel 
 over it, delve into it, build your house down on 
 it; but when you strike into the bosom of the 
 fields with your ploughshare, wounding and heal 
 ing as your feet follow deep in the long fresh 
 cut, you feel the throbbing of the heart of life 
 through the oaken handles as you never felt it 
 before ; you are conscious of a closer union, 
 dust with dust, of a more mystical union, 
 spirit with spirit, than any other approach, 
 work, or rite, or ceremony, can give you. You 
 move, but your feet seem to reach through and 
 beyond the furrow like the roots of the oak tree ; 
 sun and air and soil are yours as if the blood in 
 your veins were the flow of all sweet saps, oak 
 and maple and willow, and your breath their 
 bloom of green and garnet and gold. 
 
 And so, until I get a new plough and a horse 
 to pull it, I shall hire my neighbor hire him 
 to drive the horses, while I hold in the plough ! 
 
SPRING PLOUGHING 91 
 
 This is what I have come to ! Hiring another to 
 skim my cream and share it ! Let me handle 
 both team and plough, a plough that guides it 
 self, and a deep rich piece of bottom land, and a 
 furrow, a long straight furrow that curls and 
 crests like a narrow wave and breaks evenly into 
 the trough of the wave before. 
 
 But even with the hired plough, I am taking 
 part in the making of spring; and more: I am 
 planting me again as a tree, a bush, a mat of 
 chickweed, lowly, tiny, starry-flowered chick- 
 weed, in the earth, whence, so long ago it 
 sometimes seems, I was pulled up. 
 
 But the ploughing does more more than 
 root me as a weed. Ploughing is walking not by 
 sight. A man believes, trusts, worships something 
 he cannot see when he ploughs. It is an act of 
 faith. In all time men have known and feared 
 God; but there must have been a new and higher 
 consciousness when they began to plough. They 
 hunted and feared God and remained savage; 
 they ploughed, trusted, and loved God and 
 became civilized. 
 
 Nothing more primitive than the plough have 
 we brought with us out of our civilized past. In 
 
92 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 the furrow was civilization cradled, and there, if 
 anywhere, shall it be interred. 
 
 You go forth unto your day s work, if you 
 have land enough, until the Lord s appointed 
 close; then homeward plod your weary way, 
 leaving the world to the poets. Not yours 
 
 "The hairy gown, the mossy cell." 
 
 You have no need of them. 
 What more 
 
 Of every star that Heaven doth shew 
 And every hearb that sips the dew " 
 
 can the poet spell than all day long you have 
 felt ? Has ever poet handled more of life than 
 you ? Has he ever gone deeper than the bottom 
 of your furrow, or asked any larger faith than 
 you of your field ? Has he ever found anything 
 sweeter or more satisfying than the wholesome 
 toilsome round of the plough ? 
 
VII 
 
 MERE BEANS 
 
 " God himself that formed the earth and made it ; he hath 
 established it ; he created it not in vain, he formed it to be 
 inhabited." Isaiah. 
 
 FARMER," said my neighbor, 
 Joel Moore, with considerable 
 finality, "has got to get all he can, 
 and keep all he gets, or die." 
 " Yes," I replied with a fine platitude ; " but 
 he s got to give if he s going to get." 
 
 "Just so," he answered, his eye a-glitter with 
 wrath as it traveled the trail of the fox across the 
 
94 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 dooryard ; "just so, and I 11 go halves with the 
 soil ; but I never signed a lease to run this farm 
 on shares with the varmints." 
 
 " Well," said I, " I ve come out from the city 
 to run my farm on shares with the whole uni 
 verse fox and hawk, dry weather and wet, sum 
 mer and winter. I believe there is a great deal 
 more to farming than mere beans. I m going to 
 raise birds and beasts as well. I m going to cul 
 tivate everything, from my stone-piles up to the 
 stars." 
 
 He looked me over. I had not been long out 
 from the city. Then he said, thinking doubtless 
 of my stone-piles : 
 
 " Professor, you ve bought a mighty rich piece 
 of land. And it s just as you say; there s more 
 to farmin than beans. But, as I see it, beans are 
 beans any way you cook em ; and I think, if I 
 was you, I would hang on a while yet to my 
 talkin job in the city." 
 
 It was sound advice. I have a rich farm. I 
 have raised beans that were beans, and I have 
 raised birds, besides, and beasts, a perfectly enor 
 mous crop of woodchucks; I have cultivated 
 everything up to the stars; but I find it neces- 
 
MERE BEANS 95 
 
 sary to hang on a while yet to my talkin job in 
 the city. 
 
 Nevertheless, Joel is fundamentally wrong 
 about the beans, for beans are not necessarily 
 beans any way you cook them, nor are beans 
 mere beans any way you grow them not if I 
 remember Thoreau and my extensive ministerial 
 experience with bean suppers. 
 
 As for growing mere beans listen to Thoreau. 
 He is out in his patch at Walden. 
 
 "When my hoe tinkled against the stones, 
 that music echoed to the woods and the sky, and 
 was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded 
 an instant and immeasurable crop. It was no 
 longer beans that I hoed, nor I that hoed 
 beans." 
 
 Who was it, do you suppose, that hoed ? And, 
 if not beans, what was it that he hoed? Well, 
 poems for one thing, prose poems. If there is a 
 more delightful chapter in American literature 
 than that one in Walden on the bean-patch, I 
 don t know which chapter it is. That patch was 
 made to yield more than beans. The very stones 
 were made to tinkle till their music sounded on 
 the sky. 
 
96 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 " As / see it, beans are beans," said Joel. And 
 so they are, as he sees them. 
 
 Is not the commonplaceness, the humdrumness, 
 the dead-levelness, of life largely a matter of indi 
 vidual vision, "as I see it"? 
 
 Take farm life, for instance, and how it is typi 
 fied in my neighbor ! how it is epitomized, too, 
 and really explained in his "beans are beans"! 
 He raises beans; she cooks beans; they eat beans. 
 Life is pretty much all beans. If "beans are 
 beans," why, how much more is life? 
 
 He runs his farm on halves with the soil, and 
 there the sharing stops, and consequently there 
 the returns stop. He gives to the soil and the soil 
 gives back, thirty, sixty, an hundredfold. What 
 if he should give to the skies as well ? to the 
 wild life that dwells with him on his land? to 
 the wild flowers that bank his meadow brook ? 
 to the trees that cover his pasture slopes ? Would 
 they, like the soil, give anything back? 
 
 Off against the sky to the south a succession 
 of his rounded slopes shoulder their way from the 
 woods out to where the road and the brook wind 
 through. They cannot be tilled; the soil is too 
 scant and gravelly; but they are lovely in their 
 
MERE BEANS 97 
 
 gentle forms, and still lovelier in their clumps of 
 mingled cedars and gray birches, scattered dark 
 and sharply pointed on the blue of the sky, and 
 diffuse, and soft, and gleaming white against the 
 hillside s green. I cannot help seeing them from 
 my windows, cannot help lingering over them 
 could not, rather; for recently my neighbor (and 
 there never was a better neighbor) sent a man over 
 those hills with an axe, and piled the birches into 
 cords of snowy firewood. 
 
 It was done. I could not help it, but in my 
 grief I went over and spoke to him about it. 
 He was sorry, and explained the case by 
 saying, 
 
 " Well, if there s one kind of tree I hate more 
 than another, it s a gray birch." 
 
 We certainly need a rural uplift. We need 
 an urban uplift, too, no doubt, for I suppose 
 " beans are beans " in Boston, just as they are here 
 in Hingham. But it does seem the more astonish 
 ing that in the country, where the very environ 
 ment is poetry, where companionship with living 
 things is constant, where even the labor of one s 
 hands is cooperation with the divine forces of 
 nature the more astonishing, I say, that under 
 
98 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 these conditions life should so often be but bare 
 existence, mere beans. 
 
 There are many causes for this, one of them 
 being an unwillingness to share largely with 
 the whole of nature. " I 11 go halves with the 
 soil," said my neighbor; but he did not sign a 
 lease to run his farm on shares with the " var 
 mints," the fox, which stole his fine rooster, on 
 this particular occasion. 
 
 But such a contract is absolutely necessary if 
 one is to get out of farm life out of any life 
 its flowers and fragrance, as well as its pods and 
 beans. And, first, one must be convinced, must 
 acknowledge to one s self, that the flower and 
 fragrance are needed in life, are as useful as pods 
 and beans. A row of sweet peas is as neces 
 sary on the farm as a patch of the best wrinkled 
 variety in the garden. 
 
 But to come back to the fox. 
 
 Now, I have lived long enough, and I have 
 had that fox steal roosters enough, to understand, 
 even feel, my neighbor s wrath perfectly. I fully 
 sympathize with him. What, then, you ask, of 
 my sympathy for the fox ? 
 
 At times, I must admit, the strain has been 
 
MERE BEANS 99 
 
 very great. More than once (three times, to be 
 exact) I have fired at that same fox to kill. I 
 have lost many a rooster, but those I have not lost 
 are many, many more. Browned to a turn, and 
 garnished with parsley, a rooster is almost a poem. 
 So was that wild fox, the other morning, almost 
 a poem, standing on the bare knoll here near the 
 house, his form half-shrouded in the early mist, 
 his keen ears pricked, his pointed nose turned 
 toward the yard where the hens were waking 
 up. 
 
 Something primitive, something wild and free 
 and stirring, something furtive, crafty, cunning 
 the shadow of the dark primeval forest, at 
 sight of him, fell across the glaring common- 
 placeness of that whole tame day. 
 
 I will not ask, Was it worth the rooster? For 
 that is too gross, too cheap a price to pay for a 
 glimpse of wild life that set the dead nerves of 
 the cave man in me thrilling with new life. Rather 
 I would ask, Are such sights and thrills worth 
 the deliberate purpose to have a woodlot, as well 
 as a beanpatch and a henyard, on the farm? 
 
 Our American farm life needs new and better 
 machinery, better methods, better buildings, bet- 
 
too THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 ter roads, better schools, better stock ; but given 
 all of these, and farm life must still continue to 
 be earthy, material, mere beans only more of 
 them until the farm is run on shares with all 
 the universe around, until the farmer learns not 
 only to reap the sunshine, but also to harvest the 
 snow; learns to get a real and rich crop out of 
 his landscape, his shy, wild neighbors, his inde 
 pendence and liberty, his various, difficult, yet 
 strangely poetical, tasks. 
 
 But, if farm life tends constantly to become 
 earthy, so does business life, and professional life 
 beans, all of it. 
 
 The farmers educated for mere efficiency, the 
 merchants, the preachers, doctors, lawyers, edu 
 cated for mere efficiency, are educated for mere 
 beans. A great fortune, a great congregation, a 
 great practice, a great farm crop, are one and all 
 mere beans. Efficiency is not a whole education, 
 nor meat a whole living, nor the worker the 
 whole man. 
 
 And I said as much to J oel. 
 
 "Beans," I said, "must be raised. Much of 
 life must be spent hoeing the beans. But I am 
 going to ask myself: Is it mere beans that I 
 
MERE BEANS 101 
 
 am hoeing? And is it the whole of me that is 
 hoeing the beans ? " 
 
 " Well," he replied, " you settle down on that 
 farm of yours as I settled on mine, and I 11 tell 
 you what answer you 11 get to them questions. 
 There ain t no po try about farmin . God did n t 
 intend there should be as I see it" 
 
 " Now, that is n t the way I see it at all. This 
 is God s earth, and there could n t be a better 
 one." 
 
 " Of course there could n t, but there was one 
 once." 
 
 "When?" I asked, astonished. 
 
 " In the beginning." 
 
 " You mean the Garden of Eden ? " 
 
 "Just that." 
 
 44 Why, man, this earth, this farm of yours, is 
 the Garden of Eden." 
 
 " But it says God drove him out of the Garden 
 and, what s more, it says He made him farm for 
 a livin , don t it ? " 
 
 44 That s what it says," I replied. 
 
 44 Well, then, as I see it, that settles it, don t 
 it *? God puts a man on a farm when he ain t fit 
 for anything else. Least, that s the way I see it. 
 
102 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 That s how I got here, I s pose, and I s pose 
 that s why I stay here." 
 
 " But," said I, " there s another version of that 
 farm story." 
 
 " Not in the Bible *? " he asked, now beginning 
 to edge away, for it was not often that I could 
 get him so near to books as this. Let me talk 
 books with Joel Moore and the talk lags. Farm 
 ing and neighboring are Joel s strong points, not 
 books. He is a general farmer and a kind of 
 universal neighbor (that being his specialty); 
 on neighborhood and farm topics his mind is 
 admirably full and clear. 
 
 " That other version is in the Bible, right along 
 with the one you ve been citing just before it 
 in Genesis." 
 
 He faced me squarely, a light of confidence in 
 his eye, a ring of certainty, not to say triumph, 
 in his tones : 
 
 " You re sure of that, Professor ? " 
 
 " Reasonably." 
 
 " Well, I m not a college man, but I ve read 
 the Bible. Let s go in and take a look at Holy 
 Writ on farmin ," leading the way with alac 
 rity into the house. 
 
MERE BEANS 103 
 
 " My father was a great Bible man down in 
 Maine," he went on. " Let me raise a curtain. 
 This was his," pointing to an immense family 
 Bible, with hand-wrought clasps, that lay beneath 
 the plush family album, also clasped, on a frail 
 little table in the middle of the parlor floor. 
 
 The daylight came darkly through the thick 
 muslin draperies at the window and fell in a 
 faint line across the floor. An oval frame of hair- 
 flowers hung on the wall opposite me a somber 
 wreath of immortelles for the departed of the 
 departed black, brown, auburn, and grizzled- 
 gray, with one touch (a calla lily, I think) of the 
 reddest hair I ever beheld. In one corner of the 
 room stood a closed cabinet organ ; behind me, a 
 tall base-burner, polished till it seemed to light 
 the dimmest corners of the room. There was no 
 fire in the stove ; there was no air in the room, 
 only the mingled breath of soot and the hair- 
 flowers and the plush album and the stuffed 
 blue jay under the bell-jar on the mantelpiece, 
 and the heavy brass-clasped Bible. There was 
 no coffin in the room ; but Joel took up the 
 Bible and handed it to me as if we were having a 
 funeral. 
 
104 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 "Read me that other account of Adam s farm," 
 he said ; " I can t see without my specs." 
 
 In spite of a certain restraint of manner and 
 evident uneasiness at the situation, he had some 
 thing of boldness, even the condescension of the 
 victor toward me. He was standing and looking 
 down at me; yet he stood ill at ease by the 
 table. 
 
 " Sit down, Joel," I said, assuming an authority 
 in his house that I saw he could not quite feel. 
 
 " I can t ; I ve got my overhalls on." 
 
 " Let us do all things decently and in order, 
 Joel," I continued, touching the great Book rev 
 erently. 
 
 " But I never set in this room. My chair s out 
 there in the kitchen." 
 
 I moved over to the window to get what light 
 I could, Joel following me with furtive, sidelong 
 glances, as if he saw ghosts in the dark corners. 
 
 " We keep this room mostly for funerals," he 
 volunteered, in order to stir up talk and lay what 
 of the silence and the ghosts he could. 
 
 " I 11 read your story of Adam s farming first," 
 I said, and began : " These are the generations 
 of the heavens and of the earth " going on with 
 
MERE BEANS 105 
 
 the account of the dry, rainless world, and with no 
 man to till the soil; then to the forming of Adam 
 out of the dust, and the planting of Eden ; of 
 the rivers, of God s mistake in trying Adam 
 alone in the Garden, of the rib made into Eve, 
 of the prohibited tree, the snake, the wormy 
 apple, the fall, the curse, the thorns and how, 
 in order to crown the curse and make it real, 
 God drove the sinful pair forth from the Garden 
 and condemned them to farm for a living. 
 
 " That s it," Joel muttered with a mourner s 
 groan. " That s Holy Writ on farmin as 
 / understand it. Now, where s the other 
 story?" 
 
 " Here it is," I answered, " but we ve got to 
 have some fresh air and more light on it," rising 
 as I spoke and reaching for the bolt on the front 
 door. With a single quick jerk I had it back, and 
 throwing myself forward, swung the door wide 
 to the open sky, while Joel groaned again, and 
 the big, rusty hinges thrice groaned at the surprise 
 and shock of it. But the thing was done. 
 
 A flood of warm, sweet sunshine poured over 
 us ; a breeze, wild-rose-and-elder-laden, swept in 
 out of the broad meadow that stretched from the 
 
106 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 very doorstep to a distant hill of pines, and 
 through the air, like a shower in June, fell the 
 notes of soaring, singing bobolinks. 
 
 Joel stood looking out over his farm with the 
 eyes of a stark stranger. He had never seen it 
 from the front door before. It was a new pros 
 pect. 
 
 " Let J s sit here on the millstone step," I said, 
 bringing the Bible out into the fresh air, " and 
 I 11 read you something you never heard before," 
 and I read, laying the emphasis so as to render 
 a new thing of the old story, " In the begin 
 ning God created the heaven and the earth, and 
 the earth was without form and void; and dark 
 ness was upon the face of the deep. And the 
 spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters. 
 And God said, Let there be light ; and there was 
 light. And God saw the light that it was good. 
 And God divided the light from the darkness. 
 And God called the light day, and the darkness 
 he called night. 
 
 "And the evening and the morning were the 
 first day." 
 
 Starting each new phase of the tale with "And 
 God said," and bringing it to a close with " And 
 
MERE BEANS 107 
 
 God saw that it was good," I read on through 
 the seas and dry land, the sun and stars, and all 
 living things, to man and woman "male and 
 female created he them " and in his own like 
 ness, blessing them and crowning the blessing 
 with saying, " Be fruitful and multiply and re 
 plenish the earth and subdue it," farm for a 
 living ; rounding out the whole marvelous story 
 with the sweet refrain: "And God saw every 
 thing that he had made, and behold it was very 
 good. 
 
 " And the evening and the morning were the 
 sixth day." 
 
 " Thus, Joel," I concluded, glancing at him as 
 with opened eyes he looked out for the first 
 time over his new meadow, " thus, according 
 to my belief, and not as you have been read 
 ing it, were the heavens and the earth finished 
 and all the host of them." 
 
 He took the old book in his lap and sat 
 silent with me for a while on the step. Then he 
 said : 
 
 "Nobody has got to the bottom of that book 
 yet, have they *? And it s true ; it s all true. It s 
 just accordin as you see it. Do ye know what 
 
io8 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 I m going to do ? I m going to buy one of 
 them double-seated red swings and put it right 
 out here under this sassafras tree, and Hannah and 
 I are going to set in, and swing in it, and listen 
 a little to them bobolinks." 
 
VIII 
 A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE 
 
 T is a long road from anywhere to 
 Mullein Hill, and only the rural 
 postman and myself travel it at all 
 I frequently. The postman goes by, 
 if he can, every weekday, somewhere between 
 dawn and dark, the absolute uncertainty of his 
 passing quite relieving the road of its wooded 
 loneliness. I go back and forth somewhat regu 
 larly; now and then a neighbor takes this route 
 to the village, and at rarer intervals an automo 
 bile speeds over the "roller coaster road"; but 
 
no THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 seldom does a stranger on foot appear so far from 
 the beaten track. One who walks to Mullein Hill 
 deserves and receives a welcome. 
 
 I may be carting gravel when he comes, as I 
 was the day the Pilgrim from Dubuque arrived. 
 Swinging the horses into the yard with their stag 
 gering load, I noticed him laboring up the Hill 
 by the road in front. He stopped in the climb for 
 a breathing spell, a tall, erect old man in black, 
 with soft, high-crowned hat, and about him some 
 thing, even at the distance, that was I don t 
 know unusual old-fashioned Presbyterian. 
 
 Dropping the lines, I went down to greet the 
 stranger, though I saw he carried a big blue book 
 under his arm. To my knowledge no book-agent 
 had ever been seen on the Hill. But had I never 
 seen one anywhere I should have known this man 
 had not come to sell me a book. " More likely," 
 I thought, " he has come to give me a book. We 
 shall see." Yet I could not quite make him out, 
 for while he was surely professional, he was not 
 exactly clerical, in spite of a certain Scotch- 
 Covenanter-something in his appearance. He had 
 never preached at men, I knew, as instinctively as 
 I knew he had never persuaded them with books 
 
A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE in 
 
 or stocks or corner-lots in Lhassa. He had a fine, 
 kindly face, that was singularly clear and simple, 
 in which blent the shadows and sorrows of years 
 with the serene and mellow light of good thoughts. 
 
 " Is this Mullein Hill ? " he began, shifting the 
 big blue copy of the " Edinburgh Review " from 
 under his arm. 
 
 "You re on Mullein Hill," I replied, "and 
 welcome." 
 
 "Is are you Dallas Lore " 
 
 " Sharp ? " I said, finishing for him. " Yes, sir, 
 this is Dallas Lore Sharp, but these are not his over 
 alls not yet; for they have never been washed 
 and are about three sizes too large for him." 
 
 He looked at me, a little undone, I thought, 
 disappointed, maybe, and a bit embarrassed at 
 having been betrayed by overalls and rolled-up 
 sleeves and shovels. He had not expected the 
 overalls, not new ones, anyhow. And why are 
 new overalls so terribly new and unwashed! 
 Only a woman, only a man s wife, is fitted to 
 buy his overalls, for she only is capable of allow 
 ing enough for shrinkage. To-day I was in my 
 new pair, but not of them, not being able to get 
 near enough to them for that. 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 " I am getting old," he went on quickly, his 
 face clearing ; " my perceptions are not so keen, 
 nor my memory so quick as it used to be. I 
 should have known that good writing must have 
 a pre-literary existence as lived reality ; the writ 
 ing must be only the necessary accident of its 
 being lived over again in thought " quoting 
 verbatim, though I was slow in discovering it, 
 from an essay of mine, published years before. 
 
 It was now my turn to allow for shrinkage. 
 Had he learned this passage for the visit and ap 
 plied it thus by chance"? My face must have 
 showed my wonder, my incredulity, indeed, for 
 explaining himself he said, 
 
 " I am a literary pilgrim, sir " 
 
 " Who has surely lost his way," I ventured. 
 
 Then with a smile that made no more allow 
 ances necessary he assured me, 
 
 " Oh, no, sir ! I am quite at home in the hills 
 of Hingham. I have been out at Concord for a 
 few days, and am now on the main road from 
 Concord to Dubuque. I am Mr. Kinnier, Dr. 
 Kinnier, of Dubuque, Iowa, and" releasing 
 my hand "let me see" pausing as we reached 
 the top of the hill, and looking about in search 
 
A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE 113 
 
 of something "Ah, yes [to himself], there on 
 the horizon they stand, those two village spires, 
 those tapering steeples where they look up to 
 worship toward the sky, and look down to scowl 
 across the street " quoting again, word for 
 word, from another of my essays. Then to me : 
 " They are a little farther away and a little closer 
 together than I expected to see them too close 
 [to himself again] for God to tell from which 
 side of the street the prayers and praises come, 
 mingling as they must in the air." 
 
 He said it with such thought-out conviction, 
 such sweet sorrow, and with such relief that I 
 began now to fear for what he might quote next 
 and miss from the landscape. The spires were 
 indeed there (may neither one of them now be 
 struck by lightning !) ; but what a terrible mem 
 ory the man has ! Had he come from Dubuque 
 to prove me 
 
 The spires, however, seemed to satisfy him; 
 he could steer by them ; and to my great relief, 
 he did not demand a chart to each of the won 
 ders of Mullein Hill my thirty-six woodchuck 
 holes, etc., etc., nor ask, as John Burroughs did, 
 for a sight of the fox that performed in one of 
 
ii4 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 my books somewhat after the manner of modern 
 literary foxes. Literary foxes ! One or another 
 of us watches this Hilltop day and night with 
 a gun for literary foxes! I want no pilgrims 
 from Dubuque, no naturalists from Woodchuck 
 Lodge, poking into the landscape or under the 
 stumps for spires and foxes and boa constrictors 
 and things that they cannot find outside the book. 
 I had often wondered what I would do if such 
 visitors ever came. Details, I must confess, might 
 on many pages be difficult to verify; but for 
 some years now I have faithfully kept my four 
 boys here in the woods to prove the reality of 
 my main theme. 
 
 This morning, with heaps of gravel in the 
 yard, the hilltop looked anything but like the 
 green and fruitful mountain of the book, still 
 less like a way station between anywhere and 
 Concord! And as for myself it was no wonder 
 he said to me, 
 
 " Now, sir, please go on with your teaming. 
 I ken the lay of the land about Mullein Hill 
 
 " Whether the simmer kindly warms 
 
 Wi> life and light, 
 Or winter howls in gusty storms 
 The lang, dark night. " 
 
A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE 115 
 
 But I did not go on with the teaming. Gravel 
 is a thing that will wait. Here it lies where it 
 was dumped by the glaciers of the Ice Age. 
 There was no hurry about it ; whereas pilgrims 
 and poets from Dubuque must be stopped as 
 they pass. So we sat down and talked of 
 books and men, of poems and places, but mostly 
 of books, books I had written, and other books 
 great books " whose dwelling is the light of 
 setting suns." Then we walked over the ridges, 
 down to the meadow and the stream, and up 
 through the orchard, still talking of books, my 
 strange visitor, whether the books were prose or 
 poetry, catching up the volume somewhere with 
 a favorite passage, and going on reading on 
 from memory, line after line, pausing only to re 
 peat some exquisite turn, or to comment upon 
 some happy thought. 
 
 Not one book was he giving me, but many. The 
 tiny leather-bound copy of Burns that he drew 
 from his coat pocket he did not give me, how 
 ever, but fondly holding it in his hands said : 
 
 "It was my mother s. She always read to us out 
 of it. She knew every line of it by heart as I do. 
 " Some books are lies frae end to end 
 
n6 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 but this is no one of them. I have carried it these 
 many years." 
 
 Our walk brought us back to the house and 
 into the cool living-room where a few sticks were 
 burning on the hearth. Taking one of the rock 
 ing-chairs before the fireplace, the Pilgrim sat 
 for a time looking into the blaze. Then he be 
 gan to rock gently back and forth, his eyes fixed 
 upon the fire, quite forgetful evidently of my 
 presence, and while he rocked his lips moved 
 as, half audibly, he began to speak with some 
 one not with me with some one invisible to 
 me who had come to him out of the flame. I 
 listened as he spoke, but it was a language that 
 I could not understand. 
 
 Then remembering where he was he turned to 
 me and said, his eyes going back again beyond 
 the fire, 
 
 "She often comes to me like this; but I am 
 very lonely since she left me, lonely lonely 
 and so I came on to Concord to visit Thoreau s 
 grave." 
 
 And this too was language I could not under 
 stand. I watched him in silence, wondering what 
 was behind his visit to me. 
 
A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE 117 
 
 " Thoreau was a lonely man," he went on, " as 
 most writers are, I think, but Thoreau was very 
 lonely." 
 
 " Wild," Burroughs had called him; "irritat 
 ing," I had called him ; and on the table beside 
 the Pilgrim lay even then a letter from Mr. Bur 
 roughs, in which he had taken me to task on be 
 half of Thoreau. 
 
 " I feel like scolding you a little," ran the let 
 ter, "for disparaging Thoreau for my benefit. 
 Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. I may be 
 more human, but he is certainly more divine. 
 His moral and ethical value I think is much 
 greater, and he has a heroic quality that I cannot 
 approach." 
 
 There was something queer in this. Why had 
 I not understood Thoreau? Wild he surely was, 
 and irritating too, because of a certain strain 
 and self-consciousness. A "counter-irritant" he 
 called himself. Was this not true*? 
 
 As if in answer to my question, as if to explain 
 his coming out to Mullein Hill, the Pilgrim 
 drew forth a folded sheet of paper from his 
 pocket and without opening it or looking at it, 
 said : 
 
n8 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 "I wrote it the other day beside Thoreau s 
 grave. You love your Thoreau you will un 
 derstand." 
 
 And then in a low, thrilling voice, timed as to 
 some solemn chant, he began, the paper still 
 folded in his hands : 
 
 "A lonely wand rer stands beside the stone 
 
 That marks the grave where Thoreau s ashes lie; 
 An object more revered than monarch s throne, 
 Or pyramids beneath Egyptian sky. 
 
 " He turned his feet from common ways of men, 
 And forward went, nor backward looked around; 
 Sought truth and beauty in the forest glen, 
 And in each opening flower glory found. 
 
 "He paced the woodland paths in rain and sun; 
 With joyous thrill he viewed the season s sign; 
 And in the murmur of the meadow run 
 With raptured ear he heard a voice divine. 
 
 " Truth was the beacon ray that lured him on. 
 It lit his path on plain and mountain height, 
 In wooded glade and on the flow ry lawn 
 Where er he strayed, it was his guiding light. 
 
 " Close by the hoary birch and swaying pine 
 To Nature s voice he bent a willing ear; 
 And there remote from men he made his shrine, 
 Her face to see, her many tongues to hear. 
 
A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE 119 
 
 "The robin piped his morning song for him ; 
 The wild crab there exhaled its rathe perfume ; 
 The loon laughed loud and by the river s brim 
 The water willow waved its verdant plume. 
 
 " For him the squirrels gamboled in the pines, 
 
 And through the pane the morning sunbeams glanced ; 
 The zephyrs gently stirred his climbing vines 
 And on his floor the evening shadows danced. 
 
 " To him the earth was all a fruitful field. 
 He saw no barren waste, no fallow land ; 
 The swamps and mountain tops would harvests yield ; 
 And Nature s stores he garnered on the strand. 
 
 " There the essential facts of life he found. 
 
 The full ripe grain he winnowed from the chaff; 
 And in the pine tree, rent by lightning round, 
 He saw God s hand and read his autograph. 
 
 "Against the fixed and complex ways of life 
 His earnest, transcendental soul rebelled ; 
 And chose the path that shunned the wasted strife, 
 Ignored the sham, and simple life upheld. 
 
 " Men met him, looked and passed, but knew him not, 
 And critics scoffed and deemed him not a seer. 
 He lives, and scoff and critic are forgot ; 
 We feel his presence and his words we hear. 
 
 " He passed without regret, oft had his breath 
 Bequeathed again to earth his mortal clay, 
 Believing that the darkened night of death 
 Is but the dawning of eternal day." 
 
120 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 The chanting voice died away and the 
 woods were still. The deep waters of Walden 
 darkened in the long shadows of the trees that 
 were reaching out across the pond. Evening was 
 close at hand. Would the veerysing again? Or 
 was it the faint, sweet music of the bells of Lin 
 coln, Acton, and Concord that I heard, humming 
 in the pine needles outside the window, as if they 
 were the strings of a harp? 
 
 The chanting voice died away and the room 
 was still; but I seem to hear that voice every 
 time I open the pages of " The Week " or " Wal 
 den." And the other day, as I stood on the shores 
 of the pond, adding my stone to the cairn where 
 the cabin used to stand, a woodthrush off in the 
 trees (trees that have grown great since Thoreau 
 last looked upon them), began to chant or 
 was it the Pilgrim from Dubuque? 
 
 Truth was the beacon ray that lured him on. 
 It lit his path on plain and mountain height, 
 In wooded glade and on the flow ry lawn 
 Where er he strayed, it was his guiding light." 
 
IX 
 THE HONEY FLOW 
 
 ND this our life, exempt from public 
 haunt and those swift currents that 
 carry the city-dweller resistlessly 
 into the movie show, leaves us 
 caught in the quiet eddy of little unimportant 
 things, digging among the rutabagas, playing 
 the hose at night, casting the broody hens into 
 the " dungeon," or watching the bees. 
 
 Many hours of my short life I have spent 
 watching the bees, blissful, idle hours, saved 
 from the wreck of time, hours fragrant of white 
 clover and buckwheat and filled with the honey 
 of nothing-to-do; every minute of them capped, 
 like the comb within the hive, against the com 
 ing winter of my discontent. If, for the good of 
 
122 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 mankind, I could write a new Commandment 
 to the Decalogue, it would read : Thou shalt keep 
 a hive of bees. 
 
 Let one begin early, and there is more health 
 in a hive of bees than in a hospital; more honey, 
 too, more recreation and joy for the philosophic 
 mind, though no one will deny that very many 
 persons prepare themselves both in body and 
 mind for the comforting rest and change of the 
 hospital with an almost solemn joy. 
 
 But personally I prefer a hive of bees. They 
 are a sure cure, it is said, for rheumatism, the 
 patient making bare the afflicted part, then with 
 it stirring up the bees. But it is saner and happier 
 to get the bees before you get the rheumatism and 
 prevent its coming. No one can keep bees with 
 out being impressed with the wisdom of the ounce 
 of prevention. 
 
 I cannot think of a better habit to contract 
 than keeping bees. What a quieting, pastoral 
 turn it gives to life ! You can keep them in the 
 city on the roof or in the attic just as you 
 can actually live in the city, if you have to; but 
 bees, even more than cows, suggest a rural pros 
 pect, old-fashioned gardens, pastures, idyls, 
 
THE HONEY FLOW 123 
 
 things out of Virgil, and Theocritus and out 
 of Spenser too, 
 
 " And more, to lulle him in his slumber soft, 
 A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe, 
 And ever drizling raine upon the loft, 
 Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne 
 Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne: 
 No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes, 
 As still are wont t* annoy the walled towne 
 Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes, 
 Wrapt in eternal! silence farre from enimyes 
 
 that is not the land of the lotus, but of the melli- 
 lotus, of lilacs, red clover, mint, and goldenrod 
 a land of honey-bee. Show me the bee-keeper and 
 I will show you a poet ; a lover of waters that go 
 softly like Siloa; with the breath of sage and 
 pennyroyal about him; an observer of nature, who 
 can handle his bees without veil or gloves. Only 
 a few men keep bees, only philosophers, I have 
 found. They are a different order utterly from 
 hen-men, bee-keeping and chicken-raising being 
 respectively the poetry and prose of country life, 
 though there are some things to be said for the hen, 
 deficient as the henyard is in euphony, rhythm, 
 and tune. 
 
 In fact there is not much to be said for the 
 
124 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 bee, not much that the public can understand; 
 for it is neither the bee nor the eagle that is the 
 true American bird, but the rooster. In one of 
 my neighboring towns five thousand petitioners 
 recently prayed the mayor that they be allowed to 
 let their roosters crow. The petition was granted. 
 In all that town, perad venture, not five bee-keep 
 ers could be found, and for the same reason that 
 so few righteous men were found in Sodom. 
 
 Bee-keeping, like keeping righteous, is exceed 
 ingly difficult; it is one of the fine arts, and no dry- 
 mash-and-green-bone affair as of hens. Queens 
 are a peculiar people, and their royal households, 
 sometimes an hundred thousand strong, are as 
 individual as royal houses are liable to be. 
 
 I have never had two queens alike, never two 
 colonies that behaved the same, never two seasons 
 that made a repetition of a particular handling 
 possible. A colony of bees is a perpetual problem ; 
 the strain of the bees, the age and disposition of 
 the queen, the condition of the colony, the state 
 of the weather, the time of the season, the little- 
 understood laws of the honey-flow, these 
 singly, and often all in combination, make the 
 wisest handling of a colony of bees a question 
 
THE HONEY FLOW 125 
 
 fresh every summer morning and new every 
 evening. 
 
 For bees should be "handled," that is, bees 
 left to their own devices may make you a little 
 honey ten to thirty pounds in the best of sea 
 sons; whereas rightly handled they will as easily 
 make you three hundred pounds of pure comb 
 honey food of prophets, and with saleratus 
 biscuit instead of locusts, a favorite dish with the 
 sons of prophets here on Mullein Hill. 
 
 Did you ever eat apple-blossom honey ? Not 
 often, for it is only rarely that the colony can be 
 built up to a strength sufficient to store this 
 earliest flow. But I have sometimes caught it; 
 and then as the season advances, and flow after 
 flow comes on with the breaking of the great 
 floral waves, I get other flavors, pure white 
 clover, wild raspberry, golden sumac, pearly 
 white clethra, buckwheat, black as axle grease, 
 and last of all, the heavy, rich yellow of the 
 goldenrod. These, by careful watching, I get 
 pure and true to flavor like so many fruit ex 
 tracts at the soda fountains. 
 
 Then sometimes the honey for a whole season 
 will be adulterated, not by anything that I have 
 
126 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 done, but by the season s peculiar conditions, or 
 by purely local conditions, conditions that may 
 not prevail in the next town at all. 
 
 One year it began in the end of July. The 
 white clover flow was over and the bees were 
 beginning to work upon the earliest blossoms of 
 the dwarf sumac. Sitting in front of the hives 
 soon after the renewed activity commenced, I 
 noticed a peculiarly rank odor on the air, and 
 saw that the bees in vast numbers were rising and 
 making for a pasture somewhere over the sprout- 
 land that lay to the north of the hives. Yet 
 I felt sure there was nothing in blossom in that 
 direction within range of my bees (they will fly 
 off two miles for food) ; nothing but dense hard 
 wood undergrowth from stumps cut some few 
 years before. 
 
 Marking their line of flight I started into the 
 low jungle to find them. I was half a mile in 
 when I caught the busy hum of wings. I looked 
 but could see nothing, not a flower of any 
 sort, nothing but oak, maple, birch, and young 
 pine saplings just a little higher than my head. 
 But the air was full of bees ; yet not of swarm 
 ing bees, for that is a different and unmistakable 
 
THE HONEY FLOW 127 
 
 hum. Then I found myself in the thick of a 
 copse of witch-hazel up and down the stems of 
 which the bees were wildly buzzing. There was 
 no dew left on the bushes, so it was not that they 
 were after ; on looking more closely I saw that 
 they were crawling down the stems to the little 
 burrs containing the seed of last fall s flowering. 
 Holding to the top of the burr with their hind 
 legs they seemed to drink head down from out 
 of the base of the burr. 
 
 Picking one of these, I found a hole at its 
 base, and inside, instead of seeds, a hollow filled 
 with plant lice or aphides, that the bees were milk 
 ing. Here were big black ants, too, and yellow 
 wasps drinking from the same pail. 
 
 But a bee s tongue, delicate as it is, would 
 crush a fragile plant louse. I picked another 
 burr, squeezing it gently, when there issued from 
 the hole at the base a drop of crystal-clear liquid, 
 held in the thinnest of envelopes, which I tasted 
 and found sweet. In burr after burr I found these 
 sacks or cysts of sweets secreted by the aphides 
 for the bees to puncture and drain. The largest 
 of them would fill a bee at a draught. Some of 
 the burrs contained big fat grubs of a beetle 
 
128 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 unknown to me, the creature that had eaten 
 the seeds, bored the hole at the base, and left the 
 burr cleaned and garnished for the aphides. These 
 in turn invited the bees, and the bees, carrying 
 this "honey-dew" home, mixed it with the pure 
 nectar of the flowers and spoiled the crop. 
 
 Can you put stoppers into these millions of 
 honey-dew jugs *? Can you command your bees 
 to avoid these dire bushes and drink only of the 
 wells at the bottoms of the white-clover tubes ? 
 Hardly that, but you can clip the wing of your 
 queen and make her obedient; you can com 
 mand the colony not to swarm, not to waste its 
 strength in drones, and you can tell it where and 
 how to put this affected honey so that the pure 
 crop is not spoiled ; you can order the going out 
 and coming in of those many thousands so that 
 every one is a faithful, wise, and efficient servant, 
 gathering the fragrance and sweet of the summer 
 from every bank whereon the clover and the wild 
 mints blow. 
 
 Small things these for a man with anything to 
 do ? Small indeed, but demanding large love and 
 insight, patience, foresight, and knowledge. It 
 does not follow that a man who can handle a 
 
THE HONEY FLOW 129 
 
 colony of bees can rule his spirit or take a city, 
 but the virtues absolutely necessary to the bee 
 keeper are those required for the guiding of na 
 tions; and there should be a bee-plank incorpo 
 rated into every party platform, promising that 
 president, cabinet, and every member of congress 
 along with the philosophers shall keep bees. 
 
X 
 
 A PAIR OF PIGS 
 
 DROPPED down beside Her on 
 the back steps and took a handful 
 of her peas to pod. She set the 
 colander between us, emptied half 
 of her task into my hat, and said : 
 
 " It is ten o clock. I thought you had to be 
 at your desk at eight this morning? And you 
 are hot and tired. What is it you have been do- 
 ing?" 
 
 " Getting ready for the pigs" I replied, laying 
 marked and steady emphasis on the plural. 
 
 "You are putting the pods among the peas 
 and the peas with the pods" and so I was. 
 " Then we are going to have another pig," she 
 went on. 
 
 44 No, not a pig this time ; I think I 11 get a 
 
A PAIR OF PIGS 131 
 
 pair. You see while you are feeding one you can 
 just as well be feeding " 
 
 " A lot of them," she said with calm convic 
 tion. 
 
 " You re right ! " I exclaimed, a little eagerly. 
 "Besides two pigs do better than " 
 
 " Well, then," very gravely and never pausing 
 for an instant in her shelling, "let s fence in the 
 fourteen acres and have a nice little piggery of 
 Mullein Hill." 
 
 The pods popped and split in her nimble fin 
 gers as if she knew a secret spring in their backs. 
 I can beat her picking peas, but in shelling peas 
 she seems to have more fingers than I have ; they 
 quite confuse me at times as they twinkle at their 
 task. 
 
 So they did now. I had spent several weeks 
 working up my brief for two pigs ; but was ut 
 terly unprepared for a whole piggery. The sud 
 denness of it, the sweep and compass of it, left 
 me powerless to pod the peas for a moment. 
 
 I ought to have been at my writing, but it 
 was too late to mention that now; besides here 
 was my hat still full of peas. I could not ungal- 
 lantly dump them back into her empty pan and 
 
132 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 quit. There was nothing for it but to pod on and 
 stop with one pig. But my heart was set on a 
 pair of pigs. College had just closed (we were 
 having our lyth of June peas) and the joy of the 
 farm was upon me. I had a cow and a heifer, 
 eighty-six hens, three kinds of bantams, ten hives 
 of bees, and two ducks. I was planning to build 
 a pigeon coop, and had long talked of turning 
 the nine-acre ridge of sprout land joining my 
 farm into a milch goat pasture, selling the milk 
 at one dollar a quart to Boston babies; I had 
 thought somewhat of Belgian hares and black 
 foxes as a side-line ; and in addition to these my 
 heart was set on a pair of pigs. 
 
 "Why won t one pig do?" she would ask. 
 And I tried to explain ; but there are things that 
 cannot be explained to the feminine mind, things 
 perfectly clear to a man that you cannot make a 
 woman see. 
 
 Pigs, I told her, naturally go by pairs, like twins 
 and scissors and tongs. They do better together, 
 as scissors do. Nobody ever bought a scissor. Cer 
 tainly not. Pigs need the comfort of one another s 
 society, and the diversion of one another to take 
 up their minds in the pen; hens I explained were 
 
A PAIR OF PIGS 133 
 
 not the only broody creatures, for all animals 
 show the tendency, and does not the Preacher 
 say, " Two are better than one : if two lie together 
 then have they heat : but how can one be warm 
 alone"? 
 
 I was sure, I told her, that the Preacher had 
 pigs in mind, for judging by the number of pig- 
 prohibitions throughout Hebrew literature, they 
 must have had pigs constantly in mind. This 
 observation of the early Hebrew poet and preacher 
 is confirmed, I added, by all the modern agri 
 cultural journals, as well as by all our knowing 
 neighbors. Even the Flannigans (an Irish family 
 down the road), even the Flannigans, I pointed 
 out, always have two pigs, for all their eight chil 
 dren and his job tending gate at the railroad cross 
 ing. They have a goat, too. If a man with that 
 sort of job can have eight children and a goat 
 and two pigs, why can t a college professor have 
 a few of the essential, elementary things, I d like 
 to know? 
 
 " Do you call your four boys a few? " she asked. 
 
 "I don t call my four Flannigan s eight," I 
 replied, "nor my one pig his two. Flannigan has 
 the finest pigs on the road. He has a wonderful 
 
134 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 way with a pair of pigs something he inherited, 
 I suppose, for I imagine there have been pigs in 
 the Flannigan family ever since " 
 
 "They were kings in Ireland," she put in 
 sweetly. 
 
 "Flannigan says," I continued, "that I ought 
 to have two pigs : * For shure, a pair o pags is 
 double wan pag, says Flannigan good clear 
 logic it strikes me, and quite convincing." 
 
 She picked up the colander of shelled peas 
 with a sigh. "We shall want the new potatoes 
 and fresh salmon to go with these," her mind not 
 on pigs at all, but on the dinner. " Can t you dig 
 me a few?" 
 
 "I might dig up a few fresh salmon," I replied, 
 " but not any new potatoes, for they have just got 
 through the ground." 
 
 " But if I wanted you to, could n t you ? " 
 
 " I don t see how I could if there are n t any 
 to dig." 
 
 "But won t you go look dig up a few hills 
 you can t tell until you look. You said you 
 did n t leave the key outside in the door yester 
 day when we went to town, but you did. And 
 as for a lot of pigs " 
 
A PAIR OF PIGS 135 
 
 " I don t want a lot of pigs," I protested. 
 
 "But you do, though. You want a lot of 
 everything. Here you ve planted five hundred 
 cabbages for winter just as if we w r ere a sauerkraut 
 factory and the probabilities are we shall go to 
 town this winter " 
 
 " Go where ! " I cried. 
 
 " And as for pigs, your head is as full of pigs 
 as Deerfoot Farm or the Chicago stockyards 
 
 Mullein Hill Sausages 
 Made of Little Pigs 
 
 that s really your dream" spelling out the 
 advertisement with pea-pods on the porch floor. 
 
 " Now, don t you think it best to save some 
 things for your children, this sausage business, 
 say, and you go on with your humble themes 
 and books?" 
 
 She looked up at me patiently, sweetly in 
 scrutable as she added : 
 
 " You need a pig, Dallas, one pig, I am quite 
 sure ; but two pigs are nothing short of the pig 
 business, and that is not what we are living here 
 on Mullein Hill for." 
 
 She went in with her peas and left me with my 
 
136 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 pigs or perhaps they were her thoughts; leav 
 ing thoughts around being a habit of hers. 
 
 What did she mean by my needing a pig*? 
 She was quite sure I needed one pig. Is it my 
 own peculiar, personal need? That can hardly 
 be, for I am not different from other men. There 
 may be in all men, deep down and unperceived, 
 except by their wives, perhaps, traits and tend 
 encies that call for the keeping of a pig. I think 
 this must be so, for while she has always said we 
 need the cow or the chickens or the parsley, she 
 has never spoken so of the pig, it being referred 
 to invariably as mine, until put into the cellar in 
 a barrel. 
 
 The pig as my property, or rather as my pecu 
 liar privilege, is utterly unrelated in her mind 
 to salt pork. And she is right about that. No 
 man needs a pig to put in a barrel. Everybody 
 knows that it costs less to buy your pig in the 
 barrel. And there is little that is edifying about 
 a barrel of salt pork. I always try to fill my mind 
 with cheerful thoughts before descending into the 
 dark of the cellar to fish a cold, white lump of 
 the late pig out of the pickle. 
 
 Not in the uncertain hope of his becoming 
 
A PAIR OF PIGS 137 
 
 pork, but for the certain present joy of his being 
 pork, does a man need a pig. In all his other 
 possessions man is always to be blest. In the pig 
 he has a constant, present reward : because the 
 pig is and there is no question as to what he 
 shall be. He is pork and shall be salt pork, not 
 spirit, to our deep relief. 
 
 Instead of spirit the pig is clothed upon with 
 lard, a fatty, opaque, snow-white substance, that 
 boils and grows limpid clear and flames with 
 heat; and while not so volatile and spirit-like as 
 butter, nevertheless it is one of earth s pure es 
 sences, perfected, sublimated, not after the soul 
 with suffering, but after the flesh with corn and 
 solid comfort the most abundant of one s pos 
 sessions, yet except to the pig the most difficult 
 of all one s goods to bestow. 
 
 The pig has no soul. I am not so sure of the 
 flower in the crannied wall, not so sure of the 
 very stones in the wall, so long have they been, 
 so long shall be; but the pig no one ever 
 plucked up a pig from his sty to say, 
 
 " I hold you here squeal and all, in my hand, 
 Little pig but if I could understand 
 What you are, squeal and all, and all in all " 
 
138 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 No poet or philosopher ever did that. But they 
 have kept pigs. Here is Matthew Arnold writing 
 to his mother about Literature and Dogma and 
 poems and "The two pigs are grown very large 
 and handsome, and Peter Wood advises us to 
 fatten them and kill our own bacon. We con 
 sume a great deal of bacon, and Flu complains 
 that it is dear and not good, so there is much to 
 be said for killing our own; but she does not 
 seem to like the idea." 
 
 " Very large and handsome " this from the 
 author of 
 
 "The evening comes, the fields are still!* 
 And here is his wife, again, not caring to have 
 them killed, finding, doubtless, a better use for 
 them in the pen, seeing that Matthew often went 
 out there to scratch them. 
 
 Poets, I say, have kept pigs, for a change, I 
 think, from their poetry. For a big snoring pig 
 is not a poem, whatever may be said of a little 
 roast pig; and what an escape from books and 
 people and parlors (in this country) is the feed 
 ing and littering and scratching of him ! You put 
 on your old clothes for him. He takes you out 
 behind the bam; there shut away from the prying 
 
A PAIR OF PIGS 139 
 
 gaze of the world, and the stern eye, conscience, 
 you deliberately^nll him, stuff him, fatten him, till 
 he grunts, then you scratch him to keep him grunt 
 ing, yourself reveling in the sight of the flesh in 
 dulged, as you dare not indulge any other flesh. 
 You would love to feed the whole family that 
 way; only it would not be good for them. You 
 cannot feed even the dog or the horse or the hens 
 so. One meal a day for the dog; a limited ra 
 tion of timothy for the horse, and scrafcb-feed for 
 the hens feed to compel them to scratch for 
 fear they will run to flesh instead of eggs; and 
 the children s wedge of pie you sharpen though 
 the point of it pierces your soul; and the potato 
 you leave off of her plate; and you forgo your 
 you get you a medicine ball, I should say, in 
 order to keep down the fat lest it overlie and 
 smother the soul. 
 
 Compelled to deny and subject the body, what 
 do I then but get me a pig and feed / /, and scratch 
 it, and bed it in order to see it fatten and to hear 
 it snore? The flesh cries out for indulgence; but 
 the spirit demands virtue; and a pig, being the 
 virtue of indulgence, satisfies the flesh and is 
 winked at by the soul. 
 
140 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 If a pig is the spirit s concession to the flesh, no 
 less is he at times a gift to the spirit. There are 
 times in life when one needs just such compan 
 ionship as the pig s, and just such shelter as one 
 finds within his pen. After a day in the classroom 
 discoursing on the fourth dimension of things 
 in general, I am prone to feel somewhat re 
 moved, at sea somewhat. 
 
 Then I go down and spread my arms along 
 the fence and come to anchor with the pig. 
 

 [GETS, I said, have kept pigs for 
 an escape from their poetry. But 
 keeping pigs is not all prose. I put 
 my old clothes on to feed him, it is 
 true ; he takes me out behind the barn ; but he 
 also takes me one day in the year out into the 
 woods a whole day in the woods with rake 
 and sacks and hay-rig, and the four boys, to gather 
 him leaves for bedding. 
 
 Leafing Day is one of the days in red on the 
 Mullein Hill Calendar; and of all our days in 
 the woods surely none of them is fresher, more 
 
142 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 fragrant, more joyous, and fuller of poetry than 
 the day we go to rake and sack and bring home 
 the leaves for the pig. 
 
 You never went after leaves for the pigs? Per 
 haps you never even had a pig. But a pig is worth 
 having, if only to see the comfort he takes in the 
 big bed of dry leaves you give him in the sunny 
 corner of his pen. And, if leafing had no other 
 reward, the thought of the snoozing, snoring pig 
 buried to his winking snout in the bed, would 
 give joy and zest enough to the labor. 
 
 But leafing like every other humble labor of 
 our life here in the Hills of Hingham has its own 
 reward, and when you can say that of any 
 labor you are speaking of its poetry. 
 
 We jolt across the bumpy field, strike into the 
 back wood-road, and turnoffupon an old stumpy 
 track over which cord wood was carted years ago. 
 Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded 
 hill the winds have whirled the oak and maple 
 leaves into drifts almost knee-deep. 
 
 We are off the main road, far into the heart 
 of the woods. We straddle stumps, bend down 
 saplings, stop while the horse takes a bite of 
 sweet birch, tack and tip and tumble and back 
 
LEAFING 143 
 
 through the tight squeezes between the trees ; and 
 finally, after a prodigious amount of "whoa"- 
 ing and " oh"- ing and squealing and screeching, 
 we land right side up and so headed that we can 
 start the load out toward the open road. 
 
 You can yell all you want to when you go 
 leafing, yell at every stump you hit, yell every 
 time a limb knocks off your hat or catches you 
 under the chin, yell when the horse stops suddenly 
 to browse on the twigs, and stands you meekly on 
 your head in the bottom of the rig. You can 
 screech and howl and yell like the wild Indian 
 that you are; you can dive and wrestle in the 
 piles of leaves, and cut all the crazy capers you 
 know; for this is a Saturday; these are the wild 
 woods and the noisy leaves; and who is there 
 looking on besides the mocking jays and the 
 crows? 
 
 The leaves pile up. The wind blows keen 
 among the tall, naked trees; the dull clouds hang 
 low above the ridge ; and through the cold gray 
 of the maple swamp below peers the ghostly face 
 of Winter. 
 
 You start up the ridge with your rake, and 
 draw down another pile, thinking, as you work, 
 
144 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 of the pig. The thought is pleasing. The warm 
 glow all over your body strikes in to your heart. 
 You rake away as if it were your own bed you 
 were gathering as really it is. He that rakes 
 for his pig rakes also for himself. A merciful 
 man is merciful to his beast, and he that gathers 
 leaves for his pig spreads a blanket of down over 
 his own winter bed. 
 
 Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I 
 pull on my boots at ten o clock and go my round 
 at the barn? Yet it does warm my feet, through 
 and through, to look into the stalls and see the 
 cow chewing her cud, and the horse cleaning up 
 his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in his 
 golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to 
 the pig s pen, to hear him snoring louder than 
 the north wind, somewhere in the depths of his 
 leaf-bed, far out of sight. It warms my feet, it 
 also warms my heart. 
 
 So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is 
 to have a pig to work for ! What zest and pur 
 pose it lends to one s raking and piling and stor 
 ing ! If I could get nothing else to spend myself 
 on, I should surely get me a pig. Then, when I 
 went to walk in the woods, I should be obliged 
 
LEAFING 145 
 
 occasionally to carry a rake and a bag with me, 
 much better things to take into the woods than 
 empty hands, and sure to scratch into light a 
 number of objects that would never come within 
 the range of opera-glass or gun or walking-stick. 
 To see things through a twenty-four-toothed rake 
 is to see them very close, as through a microscope 
 magnifying twenty-four diameters. 
 
 And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp 
 lookout for what the rake uncovers ; here under 
 a rotten stump a hatful of acorns, probably gath 
 ered by the white-footed wood-mouse. For the 
 stump "gives" at the touch of the rake, and a 
 light kick topples it down hill, spilling out a big 
 nest of feathers and three dainty little creatures 
 that scurry into the leaf-piles like streaks of day 
 light. They are the white-footed mice, long-tailed, 
 big-eared, and as clean and high-bred-looking as 
 greyhounds. 
 
 Combing down the steep hillside with our 
 rakes, we dislodge a large stone, exposing a black 
 patch of fibrous roots and leaf-mould, in which 
 something moves and disappears. Scooping up a 
 double handful of the mould, we capture a little 
 red-backed salamander. 
 
146 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 Listen ! Something piping ! Above the rustle 
 of the leaves we, too, hear a " fine, plaintive " 
 sound no, a shrill and ringing little racket, 
 rather, about the bigness of a penny whistle. 
 
 Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up 
 the call (it seems to speak out of every tree- 
 trunk !) and find the piper clinging to a twig, no 
 salamander at all, but a tiny wood-frog, Picker 
 ing s hyla, his little bagpipe blown almost to 
 bursting as he tries to rally the scattered summer 
 by his tiny, mighty "skirl." Take him nose and 
 toes, he is surely as much as an inch long; not 
 very large to pipe against this north wind that 
 has been turned loose in the bare woods. 
 
 We go back to our raking. Above us, among 
 the stones of the slope, hang bunches of Christ 
 mas fern ; around the foot of the trees we uncover 
 trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, 
 glowing with crimson berries; we rake up the 
 prince s-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and 
 wintergreen red with ripe berries a whole bou 
 quet of evergreens, exquisite, fairy-like forms 
 that later shall gladden our Christmas table. 
 
 But how they gladden and cheer the October 
 woods! Summer dead? Hope all gone? Life 
 
LEAFING 147 
 
 vanished away ? See here, under this big pine, a 
 whole garden of arbutus, green and budded, al 
 most ready to bloom! The snows shall come 
 before their sweet eyes open; but open they will 
 at the very first touch of spring. We will gather 
 a few, and let them wake up in saucers of clean 
 water in our sunny south windows. 
 
 Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us ! We 
 make a clean sweep down the hillside "jumping " 
 a rabbit -from its form under a brush-pile, dis 
 covering where a partridge roosts in a low-spread 
 ing hemlock; coming upon a snail cemetery in 
 a hollow hickory stump; turning up a yellow- 
 jackets nest built two thirds underground; tracing 
 the tunnel of a bobtailed mouse in its purpose 
 less windings in the leaf-mould, digging into a 
 woodchuck s 
 
 "But come, boys, get after those bags! It is 
 leaves in the hay-rig we want, not woodchucks 
 at the bottom of woodchuck-holes." 
 
 Two small boys catch up a bag, and hold it 
 open, while two more stuff in the crackling leaves. 
 Then I come along with my big feet, and pack 
 the leaves in tight, and on to the rig goes the 
 bulging bag. 
 
148 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 Exciting ? If you can t believe it exciting, hop 
 up on the load, and let us jog you home. Swish ! 
 bang ! thump ! tip ! turn ! joggle ! jolt ! Hold on 
 to your ribs. Pull in your popping eyes. Look 
 out for the stump! Isn t it fun to go leafing*? 
 Is n t it fun to do anything that your heart does 
 with you ? even though you do it for a pig ! 
 
 Just watch the pig as we shake out the bags 
 of leaves. See him caper, spin on his toes, shake 
 himself, and curl his tail. That curl is his laugh. 
 We double up and weep when we laugh hard; 
 but the pig can t weep, and he can t double him 
 self up ; so he doubles up his tail. There is where 
 his laugh comes off, curling and kinking in little 
 spasms of pure pig joy. 
 
 " Boosh ! Boosh ! " he snorts, and darts around 
 the pen like a whirlwind, scattering the leaves in 
 forty ways, to stop short the shortest stop ! 
 and fall to rooting for acorns. 
 
 He was once a long-tusked boar of the forest, 
 this snow-white, sawed-off, pug-nose little porker 
 of mine ages and ages ago. But he still re 
 members the smell of the forest leaves ; he still 
 knows the taste of the acorn-mast ; he is still wild 
 pig somewhere deep down within him. 
 
LEAFING 149 
 
 And we were once long-haired, strong-limbed 
 savages who roamed the forest for him ages 
 and ages ago. And we, too, like him, remember 
 the smell of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the 
 forest fruits, and of pig, roast pig. And if the pig 
 in his heart is still a wild boar, no less are we at 
 times wild savages in our hearts. 
 
 Anyhow, for one day in the fall I want to go 
 leafing. I want to give my pig a taste of acorns, 
 and a big pile of leaves to dive so deep into that 
 he cannot see his pen. No, I do not live in a 
 pen ; I do not want to ; but surely I might, if 
 once in a while I did not go leafing, did not 
 escape now and then from my little penned-in, 
 daily round into the wide, sweet woods, my an 
 cestral home. 
 
XII 
 THE LITTLE FOXES 
 
 WAS picking strawberries down 
 by the woods when some one called 
 out from the road : 
 
 " Say, ain t they a litter of young 
 foxes somewheres here in the ridges ? " 
 
 I recognized the man as one of the chronic 
 fox-hunters of the region, and answered : 
 
 " I m sure of it, by the way an old she-fox has 
 pestered my chickens lately." 
 
 " Well, she won t pester them no more. She s 
 been trapped and killed. Any man that would 
 kill a she-fox this time o year and let her pups 
 starve to death, he ain t no better than a brute, 
 he ain t. I ve hunted two days for em ; and I 11 
 hunt till I find em." And he disappeared into 
 
THE LITTLE FOXES 151 
 
 the woods, on my side of the road, upon a quest 
 so utterly futile, apparently, and so entirely 
 counter to the notion I had had of the man, that 
 I stopped my picking and followed him up the 
 ridge, just to see which way a man would go to 
 find a den of suckling foxes in all the miles and 
 miles of swamp and ledgy woodland that spread 
 in every direction about him. I did not see which 
 way he went, for by the time I reached the crest 
 he had gone on and out of hearing through the 
 thick sprout-land. I sat down, however, upon a 
 stump to think about him, this man of the shoe- 
 shop, working his careful way up and down the 
 bushy slopes, around the granite ledges, across the 
 bogs and up-grown pastures, into the matted 
 green-brier patches, hour after hour searching for 
 a hole in the ground a foot wide, for a den of little 
 foxes that were whimpering and starving because 
 their mother did not return. 
 
 He found them two miles away in the next 
 town, on the edge of an open field, near a public 
 road, and directly across from a schoolhouse ! I 
 don t know how he found them. But patience 
 and knowledge and love, and a wild, primitive 
 instinct that making shoes had never taken out 
 
152 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 of his primitive nature, helped him largely in 
 his hunt. He took them, nursed them back to 
 strength on a bottle, fed them milk and rice 
 until they could forage for themselves, turned 
 them loose in the woods, and then, that fall, he 
 shot them one after the other as often as he had 
 a holiday from the shop, or a moonlight night 
 upon which he could hunt. 
 
 But he did not kill all of them. Seven foxes 
 were shot at my lower bars last winter. It is now 
 strawberry time again, and again an old she-fox 
 lies in wait for every hen that flies over the 
 chicken-yard fence which means another litter 
 of young foxes somewhere here in the ridges. 
 The line continues, even at the hands of the man 
 with the gun. For strangely coupled with the 
 desire to kill is the instinct to save, in human 
 nature and in all nature to preserve a remnant, 
 that no line perish forever from the earth. As the 
 unthinkable ages of geology come and go, ani 
 mal and vegetable forms arise, change, and dis 
 appear; but life persists, lines lead on, and in 
 some form many of the ancient families breathe 
 our air and still find a home on this small and 
 smaller-growing globe of ours. 
 
THE LITTLE FOXES 153 
 
 And it may continue so for ages yet, with our 
 help and permission. 
 
 Wild life is changing more rapidly to-day 
 than ever before, is being swept faster and faster 
 toward the brink of the world ; but it is cheering 
 to look out of my window, as I write, and see 
 the brown thrasher getting food for her young 
 out of the lawn, to hear the scratch of squirrels 
 feet across the porch, to catch a faint and not 
 unpleasant odor of skunk through the open win 
 dow as the breeze blows in from the woods, and 
 to find, as I found in hoeing my melons early 
 this morning, the pointed prints of a fox making 
 in a confident and knowing line toward the 
 chicken- yard. 
 
 I have lived some forty years upon the earth 
 (how the old hickory outside my window mocks 
 me !), and I have seen some startling changes in 
 wild animal life. Even I can recall a great flock 
 of snowy herons, or egrets, that wandered up 
 from the South one year and stayed a while on 
 the Maurice River marshes, just as, in earlier 
 times, it is recorded that along the Delaware 
 "the white cranes did whiten the river-bank like a 
 great snow-drift." To-day the snowy herons have 
 
154 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 all but vanished from the remotest glades of the 
 South; and my friend Finley, on the trail of the 
 Western plume-hunters, searched in vain for a 
 single pair of the exquisite birds in the vast tule 
 lakes of Oregon, where, only a few weeks before 
 his trip, thousands of pairs had nested. He found 
 heaps of rotting carcasses stripped of their fatally 
 lovely plumes ; he found nests with eggs and 
 dead young, but no live birds; the family of 
 snowy herons, the whole race, apparently, had 
 been suddenly swept off the world, annihilated, 
 and was no more. 
 
 A few men with guns for money had 
 done it. And the wild areas of the world, espe 
 cially of our part of the world, have grown 
 so limited now that a few men could easily, 
 quickly destroy, blot out from the book of life, 
 almost any of our bird and animal families. 
 "Thou madest him to have dominion over the 
 works of thy hands; thou hast put all things 
 under his feet" literally, and he must go softly 
 now lest the very fowl of the air and fish of the 
 sea be destroyed forever. Within my memory 
 the passenger pigeon, by some cataclysm per 
 haps, has apparently become extinct; and the 
 
THE LITTLE FOXES 155 
 
 ivory-billed woodpecker probably, this latter by 
 the hand of man, for I knew the man who be 
 lieved that he had killed the last pair of these 
 noble birds reported from the Florida forests. So 
 we thought it had fared also with the snowy 
 heron, but recently we have had word from the 
 wardens of the Audubon Society that a remnant 
 has escaped; a few pairs of the birds have been 
 discovered along the Gulf coast so hardly can 
 Nature forgo her own! So far away does the 
 mother of life hide her child, and so cunningly ! 
 
 With our immediate and intelligent help, this 
 family of birds, from these few pairs can be 
 saved and spread again over the savannas of the 
 South and the wide tule lakes in the distant 
 Northwest. 
 
 The mother-principle, the dominant instinct 
 in all life, is not failing in our time. As Nature 
 grows less capable (and surely she does!) of 
 mothering her own, then man must turn mother, 
 as he has in the Audubon Society; as he did in 
 the case of the fellow from the shoe-shop who 
 saved the little foxes. And there is this to hearten 
 him, that, while extinction of the larger forms of 
 animal life seems inevitable in the future, a little 
 
156 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 help and constant help now will save even the 
 largest of our animals for a long time to come. 
 
 The way animal life hangs on against almost 
 insuperable odds, and the power in man s hands 
 to further or destroy it, is quite past belief until 
 one has watched carefully the wild creatures of 
 a thickly settled region. 
 
 The case of the Indian will apply to all our 
 other aborigines. It is somewhat amazing to be 
 told, as we are on good authority, that there are 
 probably more live Indians on the reservations 
 to-day than there were all told over all of North 
 America when the white men first came here. 
 Certainly they have been persecuted, but they 
 have also been given protection pens ! 
 
 Wild life, too, will thrive, in spite of inevi 
 table persecution and repression, if given only a 
 measure of protection. 
 
 Year by year the cities spread, the woods and 
 wild places narrow, yet life holds on. The fox 
 trots free across my small farm, and helps him 
 self successfully from the poultry of my careful 
 raising. 
 
 Nature man-nature has been hard on the 
 little brute to save him! His face has grown 
 
THE LITTLE FOXES 157 
 
 long from much experience, and deep-lined with 
 wisdom. He seems a normal part of civilization; 
 he literally passes in and out of the city gates, 
 roams at large through my town, and dens within 
 the limits of my farm. Enduring, determined, re 
 sourceful, quick-witted, soft-footed, he holds out 
 against a pack of enemies that keep continually 
 at his heels, and runs in his race the race of all 
 life, winning for all life, with our help, a long lease 
 yet upon the earth. 
 
 For here is Reynard sitting upon a knoll in 
 the road, watching me tear down upon him in a 
 thirty-horse-power motor-car. He steps into the 
 bushes to let me pass, then comes back to the 
 road and trots upon his four adequate legs back 
 to the farm to see if I left the gate of the henyard 
 open. 
 
 There is no sight of Nature more heartening 
 to me than this glimpse of the fox; no thought of 
 Nature more reassuring than the thought of the 
 way Reynard holds his own of the long-drawn, 
 dogged fight that Nature will put up when cor 
 nered and finally driven to bay. The globe is too 
 small for her eternally to hold out against man ; 
 but with the help of man, and then in spite of 
 
158 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 man, she will fight so good a fight that not for 
 years yet need another animal form perish from 
 the earth. 
 
 If I am assuming too much authority, it is be 
 cause, here in the remoteness of my small woods 
 where I can see at night the lights of the distant 
 city, I have personally taken a heartless hand in 
 this determined attempt to exterminate the fox. 
 No, I do not raise fancy chickens in order to 
 feed him. On the contrary, much as I love to see 
 him, I keep a double-barreled gun against his 
 coming. He knows it, and comes just the same. 
 At least the gun does not keep him away. My 
 neighbors have dogs, but they do not keep him 
 away. Guns, dogs, traps, poison nothing can 
 keep the foxes away. 
 
 It must have been about four o clock the other 
 morning when one of my children tiptoed into 
 my room and whispered, "Father, there s the old 
 fox walking around Pigeon-Henny s coop behind 
 the barn." 
 
 I got up and hurried with the little fellow into 
 his room, and sure enough, there in the fog of 
 the dim morning I could make out the form of a 
 fox moving slowly around the small coop. 
 
THE LITTLE FOXES 159 
 
 The old hen was clucking in terror to her 
 chicks, her cries having awakened the small 
 boys. 
 
 I got myself down into the basement, seized 
 my gun, and, gliding out through the cellar door, 
 crept stealthily into the barn. 
 
 The back window was open. The thick, wet 
 fog came pouring in like smoke. I moved up 
 boldly through the heavy smother and looked 
 down into the field. There was the blur of the 
 small coop, but where was the fox? 
 
 Pushing the muzzle of my double-barreled 
 gun out across the window-sill, I waited. 
 
 Yes, there, through a rift in the fog, stood the 
 fox! What a shot! The old rascal cocked his 
 ears toward the house. All was still. Quickly 
 under the wire of the coop went his paw, the old 
 hen fluttering and crying in fresh terror. 
 
 Carefully, noiselessly, I swung the muzzle of 
 the gun around on the window-sill until the bead 
 drew dead upon the thief. The cow in her stall 
 beside me did not stir. I knew that four small 
 boys in the bedroom window had their eyes riv 
 eted upon that fox waiting for me to fire. It was 
 a nervous situation, so early in the morning, in 
 
160 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 the cold, white fog, and without anything much 
 but slippers on. Usually, of course, I shot in 
 boots. 
 
 But there stood the fox clawing out my young 
 chickens, and, steadying the gun as best I could 
 on the moving window-sill, I fired. 
 
 That the fox jumped is not to be wondered 
 at. I jumped myself as both barrels went off 
 together. A gun is a sudden thing any time of 
 day, but so early in the morning, and when every 
 thing was wrapped in silence and the ocean fog, 
 the double explosion was extremely startling. 
 
 I should have fired only one barrel, for the fox, 
 after jumping, turned around and looked all over 
 the end of the barn to see if the shooting were 
 going to happen again. I wished then that I had 
 saved the other barrel. 
 
 All I could do was to shout at him, which 
 made him run off. 
 
 The boys wanted to know if I thought I had 
 killed the hen. On going out later I found that 
 I had not even hit the coop not so bad a shot, 
 after all, taking into account the size of the coop 
 and the thick, distorting qualities of the weather. 
 
 There is no particular credit to the fox in this, 
 
THE LITTLE FOXES 161 
 
 nor do I come in for any particular credit this 
 time; but the little drama does illustrate the 
 chances in the game of life, chances that some 
 times, usually indeed, are in favor of the fox. 
 
 He not only got away, but he also got away 
 with eleven out of the twelve young chicks in 
 that brood. He had dug a hole under the wire 
 of the coop, then, by waiting his chance, or by 
 frightening the chicks out, had eaten all of them 
 but one. 
 
 That he escaped this time was sheer luck ; that 
 he got his breakfast before escaping was due to 
 his cunning. And I have seen so many instances 
 of his cunning that, with my two scientific eyes 
 wide open, I could believe him almost as wise as 
 he was thought to be in the olden days of fable 
 and folk-lore. How cool and collected he can be, 
 too! 
 
 One day last autumn I was climbing the steep 
 ridge behind the mowing-field when I heard a 
 fox-hound yelping over in the hollow beyond. 
 Getting cautiously to the top of the ridge, I saw 
 the hound off below me on the side of the par 
 allel ridge across the valley. He was beating 
 slowly along through the bare sprout-land, and 
 
i6a THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 evidently having a hard time holding the trail. 
 Now and then he would throw his head up into 
 the air and howl, a long, doleful howl, as if in 
 protest, begging the fox to stop its fooling and 
 play fair. 
 
 The hound was walking, not running, and at 
 a gait almost as deliberate as his howl. Round 
 and round in one place he would go, off this way, 
 off that, then back, until, catching the scent again, 
 or in despair of ever hitting it (I don t know 
 which), he would stand stock-still and howl. 
 
 That the hound was tired I felt sure ; but that 
 he was on the trail of a fox I could not believe ; 
 and I was watching him curiously when some 
 thing stirred on the top of the ridge almost be 
 side me. 
 
 Without turning so much as my head, I saw 
 the fox, a beautiful creature, going slowly round 
 and round in a circle in a figure eight, rather 
 among the bushes ; then straight off it went 
 and back; off again in another direction and 
 back ; then in and out, round and round, utterly 
 without hurry, until, taking a long leap down the 
 steep hillside, the wily creature was off at an easy 
 trot. 
 
THE LITTLE FOXES 163 
 
 The hound did know what he was about. 
 Across the valley, up the ridge, he worked his 
 sure way, while I held my breath at his accuracy. 
 Striking the woven circle at the top of the ridge, 
 he began to weave in and out, back and forth, 
 sniffling and whimpering like a tired child, beat 
 ing gradually out into a wider and wider circle, 
 and giving the fox all the rest it could want, be 
 fore taking up the lead again and following on 
 down the trail. 
 
 The hound knew what he was about; but so 
 did the fox: the latter, moreover, taking the in 
 itiative, inventing the trick, leading the run, and 
 so in the end not only escaping the hound, but 
 also vastly widening the distance between their 
 respective wits and abilities. 
 
 I recently witnessed a very interesting instance 
 of this superiority of the fox. One of the best 
 hunters in my neighborhood, a man widely 
 known for the quality of his hounds, sold a 
 dog, Gingles, an extraordinarily fine animal, to 
 a hunter in a near-by town. The new owner 
 brought his dog down here to try him out. 
 
 The hound was sent into the woods and was 
 off in a moment on a warm trail. But it was not 
 
164 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 long before the baying ceased, and shortly after, 
 back came the dog. The new owner was disap 
 pointed ; but the next day he returned and started 
 the dog again, only to have the same thing hap 
 pen, the dog returning in a little while with a 
 sheepish air of having been fooled. Over and over 
 the trial was made, when, finally, the dog was 
 taken back to its trainer as worthless. 
 
 Then both men came out with the dog, the 
 trainer starting him on the trail and following 
 on after him as fast as he could break his way 
 through the woods. Suddenly, as in the trials 
 before, the baying ceased, but before the baffled 
 dog had had time to grow discouraged, the men 
 came up to find him beating distractedly about 
 in a small, freshly burned area among the bushes, 
 his nose full of strong ashes, the trail hopelessly 
 lost. With the help of the men the fox was dis 
 lodged, and the dog carried him on in a course 
 that was to his new owner s entire satisfaction. 
 
 The fox jumped into the ashes to save himself. 
 Just so have the swifts left the hollow trees and 
 taken to my chimney, the phoebe to my pigpen, 
 the swallow to my barn loft, the vireo to my lilac 
 bush, the screech owls to my apple trees, the red 
 
THE LITTLE FOXES 165 
 
 squirrel for its nest to my ice-house, and the flat- 
 nosed adder to the sandy knoll by my beehives. 
 I have taken over from its wild inhabitants four 
 teen acres in Hingham ; but, beginning with the 
 fox, the largest of my wild creatures, and count 
 ing only what we commonly call "animals" 
 (beasts, birds, and reptiles), there are dwelling 
 with me, being fruitful and multiplying, here on 
 this small plot of cultivated earth this June day, 
 some seventy species of wild things thirty-six 
 in feathers, fourteen in furs (not reckoning in the 
 muskrat on the other side of the road), twelve in 
 scales, four in shells, nine in skins (frogs, newts, 
 salamanders) seventy-five in all. 
 
 Here is a multiple life going serenely and 
 abundantly on in an environment whose utter 
 change from the primeval is hardly exaggerated 
 by phcebe s shift for a nest from a mossy ledge in 
 the heart of the ancient woods to a joist close up 
 against the hot roof of my pigpen behind the 
 barn. From this very joist, however, she has 
 already brought off two broods since March, one 
 of four and one of five. 
 
 As long as pigpens endure, and that shall be 
 as long as the human race endures, why should 
 
166 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 not the line of phoebes also endure ? The case of 
 the fox is not quite the same, for he needs more 
 room than a pigpen ; but as long as the domestic 
 hen endures, if we will but give the fox half the 
 chance we give to phcebe, he too shall endure. 
 
 I had climbed the footpath from the meadow 
 late one autumn evening, and stood leaning back 
 upon a short hay-fork, looking into the calm 
 moonlight that lay over the frosted field, and lis 
 tening to the hounds baying in the swamp far 
 away to the west of me. You have heard at night 
 the passing of a train beyond the mountains ; the 
 creak of thole-pins round a distant curve in the 
 river ; the closing of a barn door somewhere down 
 the valley. The far-off cry of the hounds was 
 another such friendly and human voice calling 
 across the vast of the night. 
 
 How clear their cries and bell-like ! How mel 
 low in the distance, ringing on the rim of the 
 moonlit sky, round the sides of a swinging silver 
 bell ! Their clanging tongues beat all in unison, 
 the sound rising and falling through the rolling 
 woodland and spreading like a curling wave as 
 the pack broke into the open over the level 
 meadows. 
 
THE LITTLE FOXES 167 
 
 I caught myself picking out the individual 
 voices as they spoke, for an instant, singly and 
 unmistakable, under the wild excitement of the 
 drive, then all together, a fiercer, faster chorus as 
 the chase swept unhindered across the meadows. 
 
 What was that*? A twig that broke, some 
 brittle oak leaf that cracked in the path behind 
 me ! I held my breath as a soft sound of padded 
 feet came up the path, as something stopped, 
 breathed, came on as into the moonlight, be 
 yond the circle of shadow in which I stood, walked 
 the fox. 
 
 The dogs were now very near and coming as 
 swift as their eager legs could carry them. But I 
 was standing still, so still that the fox did not 
 recognize me as anything more than a stump. 
 
 No, I was more than a stump ; that much he 
 saw immediately. But how much more than a 
 stump *? 
 
 The dogs were coming. But what was I *? The 
 fox was curious, interested, and after trying to 
 make me out from a distance, crept gingerly up 
 and sniffed at my shoes ! 
 
 But my shoes had been soaked for an hour in 
 the dew of the meadow and seemed to tell him 
 
i68 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 little. So he backed off, and sat down upon his 
 tail in the edge of the pine-tree shadow to watch 
 me. He might have outwatched me, though I 
 kept amazingly still, but the hounds were crash 
 ing through the underbrush below, and he must 
 needs be off. Getting carefully up, he trotted first 
 this side of me, then that, for a better view, then 
 down the path up which he had just come, and 
 into the very throat of the panting clamor, when, 
 leaping lightly aside over a pile of brush and 
 stones, he vanished as the dogs broke madly 
 about me. 
 
 Cool *? It was iced ! And it was a revelation 
 to me of what may be the mind of Nature. I 
 have never seen anything in the woods, never 
 had a glimpse into the heart of Nature, that has 
 given me so much confidence in the possibility 
 of a permanent alliance between human life and 
 wild life, in the long endurance yet of our vastly 
 various animal forms in the midst of spreading 
 farms and dooryards, as this deliberate dodge of 
 the fox. 
 
 At heart Nature is always just as cool and 
 deliberate, capable always of taking every advan 
 tage. She is not yet past the panic, and probably 
 
THE LITTLE FOXES 169 
 
 never will be; but no one can watch the change 
 of age-long habits in the wild animals, their ready 
 adaptability, their amazing resourcefulness, with 
 any very real fears for what civilization may yet 
 have in store for them so long as our superior 
 wit is for, instead of against, them. 
 
 I have found myself present, more than once, 
 at an emergency when only my helping hand 
 could have saved ; but the circumstances have sel 
 dom been due to other than natural causes 
 very rarely man-made. On the contrary, man- 
 made conditions out of doors the multiplicity 
 of fences, gardens, fields, crops, trees, for the pri 
 meval uniformity of forest or prairie are all in 
 favor of greater variety and more abundance of 
 wild life (except for the larger forms), because all 
 of this means more kinds of foods, more sorts of 
 places for lairs and nests, more paths and short 
 cuts and chances for escape all things that help 
 preserve life. 
 
 One morning, about two weeks ago, I was 
 down by the brook along the road, when I heard 
 a pack of hounds that had been hunting in the 
 woods all night, bearing down in my direction. 
 
 It was a dripping dawn, everything soaked in 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 dew, the leaf edges beaded, the grass blades bent 
 with wet, so that instead of creeping into the 
 bushes to wait for the hunt to drive by, I hurried 
 up the road to the steep gravel bank, climbed it 
 and sat down, well out of sight, but where I could 
 see a long stretch of the road. 
 
 On came the chase. I kept my eyes down the 
 road at the spot where the trout brook turns at 
 the foot of the slope, for here the fox, if on the 
 meadow side of the brook, would be pretty sure 
 to cross and there he stood ! 
 
 I had hardly got my eyes upon the spot, when 
 out through a tangle of wild grapevine he wound, 
 stopped, glanced up and down, then dug his heels 
 into the dirt, and flew up the road below me and 
 was gone. 
 
 He was a big fellow, but very tired, his coat 
 full of water, his big brush heavy and dragging 
 with the dripping dew. He was running a race 
 burdened with a weight of fur almost equal to 
 the weight of a full suit of water-soaked clothes 
 upon a human runner; and he struck the open 
 road as if glad to escape from the wallow of wet 
 grass and thicket that had clogged his long course. 
 
 On came the dogs, very close upon him ; and 
 
THE LITTLE FOXES 171 
 
 I turned again to the bend in the brook to see 
 them strike the road, when, flash, below me on 
 the road, with a rush of feet, a popping of dew- 
 laid dust, the fox! back into the very jaws of 
 the hounds ! Instead he broke into the tangle 
 of grapevines out of which he had first come, just 
 as the pack broke into the road from behind the 
 mass of thick, ropy vines. 
 
 Those dogs hit the plain trail in the road with 
 a burst of noise and speed that carried them 
 through the cut below me in a howling gale, a 
 whirlwind of dust, and down the hill and on. 
 
 Not one of the dogs came back. Their speed 
 had carried them on beyond the point where the 
 fox had turned in his tracks and doubled his trail, 
 on so far that though I waited several minutes, 
 not one of the dogs had discovered the trick to 
 come back on the right lead. 
 
 If I had had a gun ! Yes, but I did not. But 
 if I bad had a gun, it might have made no partic 
 ular difference. Yet it is the gun that makes the 
 difference all the difference between much or 
 little wild life life that our groves and fields may 
 have at our hands now, as once the forests and 
 prairies had it directly from the hands of the Lord. 
 
XIII 
 OUR CALENDAR 
 
 HERE are four red-lettered calen 
 dars about the house : one with the 
 Sundays in red; one with Sundays 
 and the legal holidays in red; one 
 with the Thursdays in red, Thursday being 
 publication day for the periodical sending out 
 the calendar, and one, our own calendar, with 
 several sorts of days in red all the high festival 
 days here on Mullein Hill, the last to be added 
 being the Pup s birthday which falls on Septem 
 ber 15. 
 
 Pup s Christian name is Jersey, because he 
 came to us from that dear land by express when 
 he was about the size of two pounds of sugar, 
 an explanation that in no manner accounts for 
 
OUR CALENDAR 173 
 
 all we went through in naming him. The chris 
 tening hung fire from week to week, everybody 
 calling him anything, until New Year s. It had 
 to stop here. Returning from the city New Year s 
 day I found, posted on the stand of my table- 
 lamp, the cognomen done in red, this declara 
 tion : 
 
 January I, 1915 
 
 No person can call Jersey any other 
 name but JERSEY. If anybody calls him any other name 
 but Jersey, exceeding five times a day he will have to 
 clean out his coop two times a day. 
 
 This was as plain as if it had been written on the 
 wall. Somebody at last had spoken, and not as 
 the scribes, either. 
 
 We shall celebrate Jersey s first birthday Sep 
 tember 15, and already on the calendar the day 
 is red red, with the deep deep red of our six 
 hearts! He is just a dog, a little roughish-haired 
 mixed Scotch-and-Irish terrier, not big enough 
 yet to wrestle with a woodchuck, but able to 
 shake our affections as he shakes a rat. And that 
 is because I am more than half through with my 
 fourscore years and this is my first dog! And 
 the boys this is their first dog, too, every stray 
 
i 7 4 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 and tramp dog that they have brought home, hav 
 ing wandered off again. 
 
 One can hardly imagine what that means ex 
 actly. Of course, we have had other things, chick 
 ens and pigs and calves, rabbits, turtles, bantams, 
 the woods and fields, books and kindling and 
 I have had Her and the four boys, the family 
 that is, till at times, I will say, I have not felt 
 the need of anything more. But none of these 
 things is a dog, not even the boys. A dog is one 
 of man s primal needs. "We want a dog!" had 
 been a kind of family cry until Babe s last birthday. 
 
 Some six months before that birthday Babe 
 came to me and said : 
 
 " Father, will you guess what I want for my 
 birthday?" 
 
 " A new pair of skates with a key fore and aft," 
 I replied. 
 
 "Skates in August!" he shouted in derision. 
 " Try again." 
 
 " A fast-flyer sled with automatic steering-gear 
 and an electric self-starter and stopper." 
 
 "No. Now, Father," and the little face in 
 its Dutch-cut frame sobered seriously, " it s 
 something with four legs." 
 
OUR CALENDAR 175 
 
 "A duck," I suggested. 
 
 " That has only two." 
 
 " An armadillo, then." 
 
 "No." 
 
 " A donkey." 
 
 " No." 
 
 "An elephant?" 
 
 " No." 
 
 "An alligator?" 
 
 "No." 
 
 "A h-i-p hip, p-o, po, hippo, p-o-t pot, hippo- 
 pot, a hippopota, m-u-s mus hippopotamus, 
 tbat j what it is ! " 
 
 This had always made him laugh, being the 
 way, as I had told him, that I learned to spell 
 when I went to school; but to-day there was 
 something deep and solemn in his heart, and he 
 turned away from my lightness with close-sealed 
 lips, while his eyes, winking hard, seemed sus 
 piciously open. I was half inclined to call him 
 back and guess again. But had not every one 
 of the four boys been making me guess at that 
 four-legged thing since they could talk about 
 birthdays ? And were not the conditions of our 
 living as unfit now for four-legged things as 
 
176 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 ever? Besides, they already had the cow and the 
 pig and a hundred two-legged hens. More live 
 stock was simply out of the question at present 
 
 The next day Babe snuggled down beside me 
 at the fire. 
 
 " Father," he said, " have you guessed yet ? " 
 
 "Guessed what?" I asked. 
 
 " What I want for my birthday ? " 
 
 "A nice little chair to sit before the fire in?" 
 
 " Horrors ! a chair ! why, I said a four-legged 
 thing." 
 
 " Well, how many legs has a chair ? " 
 
 "Father," he said, "has a rocking-chair four 
 legs?" 
 
 " Certainly." 
 
 " Then it must have four feet, hasn t it?" 
 
 " Cert why I don t know exactly 
 about that," I stammered. " But if you want a 
 rocking-chair for your birthday, you shall have 
 it, feet or fins, four legs or two, though I must 
 confess that I don t exactly know, according to 
 legs, just where a rocking-chair does belong." 
 
 " I don t want any chair, nor anything else 
 with wooden legs." 
 
 " What kind of legs, then ? " 
 
OUR CALENDAR 177 
 
 "Bone ones." 
 
 " Why ! why ! I don t know any bone-legged 
 things." 
 
 " Bones with hair on them." 
 
 " Oh, you want a Teddybear you, and com 
 ing eight! Well! Well! But Teddybears have 
 wire legs, I think, instead of bone." 
 
 The set look settled once more on his little, 
 square face and the talk ceased. But the fight 
 was on. Day after day, week after week, he had 
 me guessing through all the living quadrupeds 
 through all the fossil forms through many 
 that the Lord did not make, but might have 
 made, had Adam only known enough Greek and 
 Latin to give them names. Gently, persistently, 
 he kept me guessing as the far-off day drew near, 
 though long since my only question had been 
 What breed ? August came finally, and a few 
 days before the 24th we started by automobile 
 for New Jersey. 
 
 We were speeding along the road for Prince 
 ton when all four boys leaned forward from the 
 back seat, and Babe, close in my ear, said : 
 
 " Shall I have any birthday down here, Father*?" 
 
 " Certainly." 
 
178 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 " Have you guessed what yet *? " 
 
 I blew the horn fiercely, opened up the throttle 
 till the words were snatched from his teeth by 
 the swirling dust behind and conversation was 
 made impossible. Two days later, the birthday 
 found us at Uncle Joe s. 
 
 Babe was playing with Trouble, the little 
 Scotch-Irish terrier, when Uncle Joe and I came 
 into the yard. With Trouble in his arms Babe 
 looked up and asked : 
 
 " Uncle Joe, could you guess what four-legged 
 thing I want for my birthday *? " 
 
 "You want a dog," said Uncle Joe, and I 
 caught up the dear child in my arms and kept 
 back his cries with kisses. 
 
 "And you shall have one, too, if you wilt 
 give me three or four weeks to get him for you. 
 Trouble here is the daddy of goodness ! I sup 
 pose he is of I don t know how many little 
 puppies but a good many and I am giving 
 you one of them right now, for this birthday, 
 only, you will wait till their mother weans them, 
 of course *? " 
 
 " Yes, yes, of course ! " 
 
 And so it happened that several weeks later a 
 
OUR CALENDAR 179 
 
 tiny black-and-tan puppy with nothing much of 
 a tail came through from New Jersey to Hing- 
 ham to hearts that had waited for him very, very 
 long. 
 
 Pup s birthday makes the seventh red-letter 
 day of that kind on the calendar. These are only 
 the beginning of such days, our own peculiar 
 days when we keep tryst with ourselves, because 
 in one way or another these days celebrate some 
 trial or triumph, some deep experience of the 
 soul. 
 
 There is Melon Day, for example, a mov 
 able feast-day in August, if indeed it come so 
 early, when we pick the first watermelon. That, 
 you ask, a deep emotional experience, an affair of 
 the soul? 
 
 This is Massachusetts, dear reader, and I hail 
 from the melon fields of Jersey. Even there a 
 watermelon, to him who is spiritually minded, 
 who, walking through a field of the radiant orbs 
 (always buy an elongated ellipsoid for a real 
 melon), hears them singing as they shine even 
 to the Jersey man, I say, the taste of the season s 
 first melon is of something out of Eden before 
 the fall. But here in Massachusetts, Ah, .the 
 
i8o THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 cold I fight, the drought I fight, the worms I 
 fight, the blight I fight, the striped bugs I fight, the 
 will-to-die in the very vines themselves I fight, 
 until at last (once it was the yth of August !) the 
 heart inside of one of the green rinds is red with 
 ripeness, and ready to split at the sight of a knife, 
 answering to the thump with a far-off, muffled 
 thud, the family, I say, when that melon is 
 brought in crisp and cool from the dewy field, 
 is prompt at breakfast, and puts a fervor into the 
 doxology that morning deeper far than is usual 
 for the mere manna and quail gathered daily at 
 the grocer s. 
 
 We have been (once) to the circus, but that 
 day is not in red. That is everybody s day, while 
 the red-letter days on our calendar Storm-Door- 
 and-Double- Window Day, for instance; or the 
 day close to Christmas when we begin, " Marley 
 was dead, to begin with"; or the Day of the 
 First Snow these days are peculiarly, privately 
 our own, and these are red. 
 
XIV 
 
 THE FIELDS OF FODDER 
 
 T is doubtless due to early associa 
 tions, to the large part played by 
 cornfields in my boyhood, that I 
 cannot come upon one now in these 
 New England farms without a touch of home 
 sickness. It was always the autumn more than the 
 spring that appealed to me as a child; and there 
 was something connected with the husking and 
 the shocking of the corn that took deeper hold 
 upon my imagination than any other single event 
 of the farm year, a kind of festive joy, some 
 thing solemnly beautiful and significant, that to 
 this day makes a field of corn in the shock not so 
 much the substance of earth s bounty as the sym 
 bol of earth s life, or rather of life here on the 
 
182 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 earth as one could wish it to be lived to the 
 end, and rich in corn, with its fodder garnered 
 and set in order over a broad field. 
 
 Perhaps I have added touches to this picture 
 since the days when I was a boy, but so far back 
 as when I used to hunt out the deeply fluted corn 
 stalks to turn into fiddles, it was minor notes I 
 played the notes of the wind coming over the 
 field of corn-butts and stirring the loose blades as 
 it moved among the silent shocks. I have more 
 than a memory of mere corn, of heavy-eared stalks 
 cut and shocked to shed the winter rain : that, and 
 more, as of the sober end of something, the ful 
 fillment of some solemn compact between us 
 between me and the fields and skies. 
 
 Is this too much for a boy to feel ? Not if 
 he is father to the man! I have heard my own 
 small boys, with grave faces, announce that this 
 is the 2ist of June, the longest day of the year 
 as if the shadows were already lengthening, 
 even across their morning way. 
 
 If my spirit should return to earth as a flower, 
 it would come a four-o clock, or a yellow even 
 ing primrose, for only the long afternoon shad 
 ows or falling twilight would waken and spread 
 
THE FIELDS OF FODDER 183 
 
 my petals. No, I would return an aster or a witch- 
 hazel bush, opening after the com is cut, the crops 
 gathered, and the yellow leaves begin to come 
 sighing to the ground. 
 
 At that word " sighing " many trusting readers 
 will lay this essay down. They have had more 
 than enough of this brand of pathos from their 
 youth up. 
 
 "The sobbing wind, the weeping rain, 
 
 T is time to give the lie 
 To these old superstitious twain 
 That poets sing and sigh. 
 
 "Taste the sweet drops, no tang of brine, 
 
 Feel them they do not burn; 
 The daisy-buds, whereon they shine, 
 Laugh, and to blossoms turn" 
 
 that is, in June they do; but do they in October? 
 There are no daisies to laugh in October. A few 
 late asters fringe the roadsides ; an occasional bee 
 hums loudly in among them; but there is no 
 sound of laughter, and no shine of raindrops in 
 the broken hoary seed-stalks that strew the way. 
 If the daisy-buds laugh, as surely they do in 
 June, why should not the wind sob and the 
 rain weep as surely they do in October? 
 There are days of shadow with the days of sun- 
 
1 84 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 shine ; the seasons have their moods, as we have 
 ours, and why should one be accused of more 
 sentiment than sense, and of bad rhetoric, too, in 
 yielding to the spirit of the empty woods till the 
 slow, slanting rain of October weeps, and the 
 soughing wind comes sobbing through the trees ? 
 
 Fall rain, fall steadily, heavily, drearily. Beat 
 off the fading leaves and flatten them into shape 
 less patterns on the soaking floor. Fall and slant 
 and flatten, and, if you will, weep. Blow wind, 
 through the creaking branches, blow about the 
 whispering corners ; parley there outside my win 
 dow ; whirl and drive the brown leaves into hid 
 ing, and if I am sad, sigh with me and sob. 
 
 May one not indulge in gentle melancholy 
 these closing days of autumn, and invite the 
 weather in, without being taken to task for it? 
 One should no more wish to escape from the 
 sobering influence of the October days than from 
 the joy of the June days, or the thrill in the wide 
 wonder of the stars. 
 
 <( If winds have wailed and skies wept tears, 
 
 To poet s vision dim, 
 T was that his own sobs filled his ears, 
 His weeping blinded him " 
 
THE FIELDS OF FODDER 185 
 
 of course ! And blessed is the man who finds 
 winds that will wail with him, and skies that love 
 him enough to weep in sympathy. It saves his 
 friends and next of kin a great deal of perfunc 
 tory weeping. 
 
 There is no month in all the twelve as lovely 
 and loved as October. A single, glorious June 
 day is close to the full measure of our capacity 
 for joy ; but the heart can hold a month of melan 
 choly and still ache for more. So it happens that 
 June is only a memory of individual days, while 
 October is nothing less than a season, a mood, a 
 spirit, a soul, beautiful, pensive, fugitive. So 
 much is already gone, so many things seem past, 
 that all the gold of gathered crops and glory on 
 the wooded hillsides only gild and paint the 
 shadow that sleeps within the very sunshine of 
 October. 
 
 In June the day itself was the great event. It 
 is not so in October. Then its coming and going 
 were attended with ceremony and splendor, the 
 dawn with invisible choirs, the sunset with all 
 the pageantry and pomp of a regal fete. Now the 
 day has lessened, and breaks tardily and without a 
 dawn, and with a blend of shadow quickly fades 
 
186 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 into the night. The warp of dusk runs through 
 even its sunlit fabric from daybreak to dark. 
 
 It is this shadow, this wash of haze upon the 
 flaming landscape, this screen of mist through 
 which the sunlight sifts, that veils the face of the 
 fields and softens, almost to sadness, the October 
 mood of things. 
 
 For it is the inner mood of things that has 
 changed as well as the outward face of things. 
 The very heart of the hills feels it. The hush 
 that fell with the first frost has hardly been broken. 
 The blackened grass, the blasted vine, have not 
 grown green again. No new buds are swelling, 
 as after a late frost in spring. Instead, the old 
 leaves on the limbs rattle and waver down; the 
 cornfield is only an area of stubs and long lines 
 of yellow shocks; and in the corners of the 
 meadow fence stand clumps of flower-stalks, 
 joe-pye-weed, boneset, goldenrod, bare and al 
 ready bleaching; and deep within their matted 
 shade, where the brook bends about an elder 
 bush, a single amber pendant of the jewel-weed, 
 to which a bumble-bee comes droning on wings 
 so loud that a little hyla near us stops his pipe 
 to listen! 
 
THE FIELDS OF FODDER 187 
 
 There are other sounds, now that the shrill cry 
 of the hyla is stilled the cawing of crows beyond 
 the wood, the scratching of a beetle in the crisp 
 leaves, the cheep of a prying chickadee, the tiny 
 chirrup of a cricket in the grass remnants of 
 sounds from the summer, and echoes as of single 
 strings left vibrating after the concert is over and 
 the empty hall is closed. 
 
 But how sweet is the silence! To be so far 
 removed from sounds that one can hear a single 
 cricket and the creeping of a beetle in the leaves! 
 Life allows so little margin of silence nowadays. 
 One cannot sit down in quiet and listen to the 
 small voices; one is obliged to stand up in a 
 telephone booth, a pitiful, two-by-two oasis of 
 silence in life s desert of confusion and din. If 
 October brought one nothing else but this sweet 
 refuge from noises it would be enough. For the 
 silence of October, with its peculiar qualities, is 
 pure balm. There is none of the oppressive still 
 ness that precedes a severe storm, none of the 
 ominous hush that falls before the first frost, none 
 of the death-like lack of sound in a bleak snow- 
 buried swamp or pasture, none of the awesome 
 majesty of quiet in the movement of the mid- 
 
i88 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 night stars, none of the fearful dumbness of the 
 desert, that muteness without bound or break, 
 eternal none of these qualities in the sweet 
 silence of October. I have listened to all of these, 
 and found them answering to mute tongues 
 within my own soul, deep unto deep; but such 
 moods are rare moods that can meet death, 
 that can sweep through the heavens with the 
 constellations, and that can hold converse with 
 the dumb, stirless desert; whereas the need for 
 the healing and restoration found in the serene 
 silence of October is frequent. 
 
 There are voices here, however, many of them; 
 but all subdued, single, pure, as when the chorus 
 stops, and some rare singer carries the air on, and 
 up, and far away till it is only soul. 
 
 The joyous confusion and happy tumult of 
 summer are gone; the mating and singing and 
 fighting are over ; the growing and working and 
 watch-care done ; the running even of the sap has 
 ceasedfthe grip of the little twigs has relaxed, and 
 the leaves, for very weight of peace, float off into 
 the air, and all the wood, with empty hands, 
 lies in the after-summer sun, and dreams. 
 
 With empty hands in the same warm sun I lie 
 
THE FIELDS OF FODDER 189 
 
 and dream. The sounds of summer have died 
 away; but the roar of coming winter has not yet 
 broken over the barriers of the north. Above my 
 head stretches a fanlike branch of witch-hazel, 
 its yellow leaves falling, its tiny, twisted flowers 
 just curling into bloom. The snow will fall before 
 its yellow straps have burned crisp and brown. 
 But let it fall. It must melt again; for as long as 
 these pale embers glow the icy hands of winter 
 shall slip and lose their hold on the outdoor world. 
 
 And so I dream. The woods are at my back, 
 the level meadow and wide fields of corn-fodder 
 stretch away in front of me to a flaming ridge of 
 oak and hickory. The sun is behind me over the 
 woods, and the lazy air glances with every gauzy 
 wing and flashing insect form that skims the 
 sleepy meadow. But there is an unusual play 
 of light over the grass, a glinting of threads that 
 enmesh the air as if the slow-swinging wind were 
 weaving gossamer of blown silk from the steeple- 
 bush spindles through the slanting reeds of the 
 sun. 
 
 It is not the wind that weaves; it is a multitude 
 of small spiders. Here is one close to my face, 
 out at the tip of a slender grass-stem, holding on 
 
190 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 with its fore legs and kicking out backward with 
 its hind legs a tiny skein of web off into the air. 
 The threads stream and sway and lengthen, gather 
 and fill and billow, and tug at their anchorage 
 till, caught in the dip of some wayward current, 
 they lift the little aeronaut from his hangar and 
 bear him away through the sky. 
 
 Long before we dreamed of flight, this little 
 voyager was coasting the clouds. I can follow 
 him far across the meadow in the cobweb basket 
 as his filmy balloon floats shimmering over the 
 meadow sea. 
 
 Who taught him navigation? By what com 
 pass is he steering? And where will he come to 
 port? Perhaps his anchor will catch in a hard- 
 hack on the other side of the pasture ; or perhaps 
 some wild air-current will sweep him over the 
 woodtops, over the Blue Hills, and bear him a 
 hundred miles away. No matter. The wind blow- 
 eth where it listeth, and there is no port where 
 the wind never blows. 
 
 Yet no such ship would dare put to sea except 
 in this soft and sunny weather. The autumn seeds 
 are sailing too the pitching parachutes of thistle 
 and fall dandelion and wild lettuce, like fleets of 
 
THE FIELDS OF FODDER 191 
 
 tiny yachts under sail a breeze from a cut-over 
 ridge in the woods blowing almost cottony with 
 the soft down of the tall lettuce that has come up 
 thick in the clearing. 
 
 As I watch the strowing of the winds, my mel 
 ancholy slips away. One cannot lie here in the 
 warm but unquickening sun, and see this sower 
 crossing meadow and cornfield without a vision 
 of waking life, of fields again all green where 
 now stands the fodder, of woods all full of song 
 as soon as this sowing and the sleeping of the 
 seeds are done. The autumn wind goeth forth 
 to sow, and with the most lavish of hands. He 
 wings his seeds, and weights his seeds, he burrs 
 them, rounds them, and angles them; they fly and 
 fall, they sink and swim, they stick and shoot, 
 they pass the millstones of the robins gizzards for 
 the sake of a chance to grow. They even lie in 
 wait for me, plucking me by the coat-sleeve, fas 
 tening upon my trousers leg and holding on until 
 I have walked with them into my very garden. 
 The cows are forced to carry them, the squirrel 
 to hide them, the streams to whirl them on their 
 foaming drift into places where no bird or squirrel 
 or wayward breeze would go. Not a corner within 
 
192 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 the horizon but will get its needed seed, not a 
 nook anywhere, from the wind-swept fodder-field 
 to the deepest, darkest swamp, but will come to 
 life and flower again with the coming spring. 
 
 The leaves are falling, the birds are leaving, 
 most of them having already gone. Soon I shall 
 hear the bugle notes of the last guard as the 
 Canada geese go over, headed swift and straight 
 for the South. And yonder stands the fodder, 
 brown and dry, the slanting shocks securely tied 
 against the beating rains. How can one be mel 
 ancholy when one knows the meaning of the 
 fodder, when one is able to find in it his faith in 
 the seasons, and see in it the beauty and the wis 
 dom which has been built into the round of the 
 year*? 
 
 To him who lacks this faith and understanding 
 let me give a serene October day in the woods. 
 Go alone, lie down upon a bank where you can 
 get a large view of earth and sky. " One seems 
 to get nearer to nature in the early spring days," 
 says Mr. Burroughs. I think not, not if by nearer 
 you mean closer to the heart and meaning of 
 things. " All screens are removed, the earth 
 everywhere speaks directly to you; she is not 
 
THE FIELDS OF FODDER 193 
 
 hidden by verdure and foliage." That is true ; yet 
 for most of us her lips are still dumb with the 
 silence of winter. One cannot come close to bare, 
 cold earth. There is only one flat, faded expres 
 sion on the face of the fields in March ; whereas 
 in October there is a settled peace and sweetness 
 over all the face of Nature, a fullness and a non- 
 withholding in her heart that makes communica 
 tion natural and understanding easy. 
 
 The sap is sinking in the trees, the great tides 
 of life have turned, but so slowly do they run 
 these soft and fragrant days that they seem almost 
 still, as at flood. A blue jay is gathering acorns 
 overhead, letting one drop now and then to roll 
 out of sight and be planted under the mat of 
 leaves. Troops of migrating warblers flit into 
 and through the trees, talking quietly among 
 themselves as they search for food, moving all the 
 while and to a fixed goal, the far-off South. 
 Bob-white whistles from the fodder-field ; the odor 
 of ripened fox grapes is brought with a puff of 
 wind from across the pasture ; the smell of mint, 
 of pennyroyal, and of sweet fern crisping in the 
 sun. These are not the odors of death; but the 
 fragrance of life s very essence, of life ripened and 
 
194 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 perfected and fit for storing till another harvest 
 comes. And these flitting warblers, what are they 
 but another sign of promise, another proof of the 
 wisdom which is at the heart of things? And 
 all this glory of hickory and oak, of sumac and 
 creeper, of burning berries on dogwood and ilex 
 and elder this sunset of the seasons but the 
 preparation for another dawn? 
 
 If one would be folded to the breast of Nature, 
 if one would be pressed to her beating heart, if 
 one would feel the mother in the soul of things, 
 let these October days find him in the hills, or 
 where the river makes into some vast salt marsh, 
 or underneath some ancient tree with fields of 
 corn in shock and browning pasture slopes that 
 reach and round themselves along the rim of the 
 sky. 
 
 The sun circles warm above me; and up 
 against the snowy piles of cloud a broad-winged 
 hawk in lesser circles wheels and flings its pierc 
 ing cry far down to me ; a fat, dozy woodchuck 
 sticks his head out and eyes me kindly from 
 his burrow; and close over me, as if I too had 
 grown and blossomed there, bends a rank, purple- 
 flowered ironweed. We understand each other ; 
 
FIELDS OF FODDER 195 
 
 we are children of the same mother, nourished 
 at the same abundant breast, the weed and I, 
 and the woodchuck, and the wheeling hawk, and 
 the piled-up clouds, and the shouldering slopes 
 against the sky I am brother to them all. And 
 this is home, this earth and sky these fruitful 
 fields, and wooded hills, and marshes of reed and 
 river flowing out to meet the sea. I can ask for 
 no fairer home, none larger, none of more abun 
 dant or more golden corn. If aught is wanting, 
 if just a tinge of shadow mingles with the rowan- 
 scented haze, it is the early-falling twilight, the 
 thought of my days, how short they are, how 
 few of them find me with the freedom of these 
 October fields, and how soon they must fade into 
 November. 
 
 No, the thought of November does not dis 
 turb me. There is one glory of the sun and an 
 other glory of the moon, and another glory of the 
 stars ; for one star differeth from another star in 
 glory. So also are the months and seasons. And 
 if I watch closely I shall see that not only are the 
 birds leaving, but the muskrats are building their 
 winter lodges, the frogs are bedding, the buds 
 putting on their thick, furry coats life every- 
 
196 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 where preparing for the cold. I need to take the 
 same precaution, even in my heart. I will take 
 a day out of October, a day when the woods are 
 aflame with color, when the winds are so slow 
 that the spiders are ballooning, and lying where 
 I can see them ascending and the parachute seeds 
 go drifting by, I will watch until my eyes are 
 opened to see larger and plainer things go by 
 the days with the round of labor until the even 
 ing ; the seasons with their joyous waking, their 
 eager living ; their abundant fruiting, and then 
 their sleeping for they must needs sleep. First 
 the blade, then the ear, after that the full corn in 
 the ear, and after that the field of fodder. If so 
 with the com and the seasons, why not so with 
 life *? And what of it all could be fairer or more 
 desirable than its October *? to lie and look 
 out over a sunlit meadow to a field of fodder cut 
 and shocked against the winter with my own 
 hands ! 
 
XV 
 GOING BACK TO TOWN 
 
 ABOR DAY, and school lunches 
 begin to-morrow," She said, care 
 fully drying one of the " Home 
 Comforts" that had been growing 
 dusty on an upper shelf since the middle of June. 
 She set the three tin lunch-boxes (two for the 
 four boys and one for me) on the back of the 
 stove and stood looking a moment at them. 
 
 " Are you getting tired of spreading us bread 
 and butter^" I asked. 
 She made no reply. 
 
 "If you don t put us up our comforts this 
 year, how are we going to dispose of all that 
 strawberry jam and currant jelly ^ " 
 
 " I am not tired of putting up lunches," she 
 answered. " I was just wondering if this year we 
 
198 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 ought not to go back to town. Four miles each 
 way for the boys to school, and twenty each way 
 for you. Are n t we paying a pretty high price 
 for the hens and the pleasures of being snowed 
 in?" 
 
 "An enormous price," I affirmed solemnly. 
 "And we ve paid it now these dozen winters 
 running. Let s go into Boston and take that 
 suite of wedge-shaped rooms we looked at last 
 fall in Hotel Huntington, at the intersection of 
 the Avenue and the railroad tracks. The boys 
 can count freight cars until they are exhausted, 
 and watch engines from their windows night and 
 day." 
 
 " It is n t a light matter," she went on. " And 
 we can t settle it by making it a joke. You need 
 to be near your work ; I need to be nearer hu 
 man beings; the children need much more rest 
 and freedom than these long miles to school and 
 these many chores allow them." 
 
 " You re entirely right, my dear, and this time 
 we 11 do it. Our good neighbor here will take the 
 cow ; I 11 give the cabbages away, and send for 
 4 Honest Wash Curtis to come for the hens." 
 
 " But look at all this wild-grape jelly ! " she 
 
GOING BACK TO TOWN 199 
 
 exclaimed, turning to an array of forty-four little 
 garnet jars which she had just covered with hot 
 paraffin against the coming winter. 
 
 " And the thirteen bushels of potatoes," I broke 
 in. "And the apples there are going to be 
 eight or ten barrels of prime Baldwins this year. 
 And " 
 
 But it never comes to an end it never has 
 yet, for as soon as we determine to do it, we feel 
 that we can or not, just as we please. Simply de 
 ciding that we will move in yields us such an 
 instant and actual city sojourn that we seem 
 already to have been and are now gladly getting 
 back to the country again. 
 
 So here we have stayed summer and winter, 
 knowing that we ought to go back nearer my 
 work so that I can do more of it ; and nearer the 
 center of social life so we can get more of it 
 life being pretty much lost that is not spent in 
 working, or going, or talking! Here we have 
 stayed even through the winters, exempt from 
 public benefits, blessing ourselves, every time it 
 snows on Saturday, that we are here and not there 
 for our week ends, here within the " tumultuous 
 privacy " of the storm and our own roaring fire- 
 
200 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 place, with our own apples and popcorn and 
 books and selves; and when it snows on Mon 
 day wishing the weather would always temper 
 itself and time itself to the peculiar needs of Mul 
 lein Hill its length of back country road and 
 automobile. 
 
 For an automobile is not a snow-plough, how 
 ever much gasoline you give it. Time was when 
 I rode a snow-plough and enjoyed it, as my Neigh 
 bor Jonas rides and enjoys his, feeling that he is 
 plenty fast enough, as indeed he is, his sense of 
 safety on the way, the absolute certainty (so far 
 as there can be human certainty) of his arriving 
 sometime, being compensation enough for the 
 loss of those sensations of speed induced across 
 one s diaphragm and over one s epidermis by the 
 automobile. 
 
 Speeding is a disease of the hair follicles, I 
 think, and the great hallucination of haste under 
 which we move and try to have a being is seated 
 in the muscles of the diaphragm. Have I not 
 found myself rushing for a hundred places by 
 automobile that I never should have started for 
 at all by hayrick or snow-plough, and thus had 
 saved myself that time wholly ? Space is Time s 
 
GOING BACK TO TOWN 201 
 
 tail and we can t catch it. The most we can catch, 
 with the speediest car, is a sight of its tip going 
 around the corner ahead. 
 
 Speed is contagious, and I fear that I have it. 
 I moved away here into Hingham to escape it, 
 but life in the Hingham hills is not far enough 
 away to save a man from all that passes along 
 the road. The wind, too, bloweth where it listeth, 
 and when there is infection on it, you can t escape 
 by hiding in Hingham not entirely. And once 
 the sporulating speed germs get into your sys 
 tem, it is as if Anopheles had bitten you, their 
 multiplying and bursting into the blood occur 
 ring regularly, accompanied by a chill at two 
 cylinders and followed by a fever for four; a 
 chill at four and a fever for six eight twelve, 
 just like malaria ! 
 
 We all have it, all but Neighbor Jonas. He 
 has instead a "stavin" good mare by the name 
 of Bill. Bill is speedy. She sprang, years ago, from 
 fast stock, as you would know if you held the 
 cultivator behind her. When she comes to har 
 row the garden, Jonas must needs come with 
 her to say "Whoa ! " all the way, and otherwise 
 admonish and exhort her into remembering that 
 
202 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 the cultivator is not a trotting-sulky, and that a 
 row of beets is not a half-mile track. But the hard 
 highways hurt Bill s feet, so that Jonas nowadays 
 takes every automobile s dust, and none too 
 sweetly either. 
 
 " Jonas," I said, as Bill was cooling off at the 
 end of a row, " why don t you get an automo 
 bile?" 
 
 " I take the eggs down to the store every two 
 weeks and get a shave; but I don t need a car 
 much, havin Bill," he replied, smashing a vicious 
 greenhead on Bill s withers that was keeping her 
 mixed up with the traces and the teeth of the 
 harrow. "Besides, they re skittish, nervous things 
 compared with a hoss. What I d like is some 
 thing neither one nor t other a sort of cross 
 between an auto and Bill." 
 
 "Why not get a Ford car, then," I asked, 
 " with a cultivator attachment ? It would n t 
 step on as many hills in the row as Bill does, 
 and I think it would beat Bill on the road." 
 
 There was a cluck, a jump, and we were off 
 down another row, with Jonas saying: 
 
 " Not yet. Bill is still fast enough for me." 
 
 And for me, too; yet there is no denying that 
 
GOING BACK TO TOWN 203 
 
 conditions have changed, that a multitude of 
 new ills have been introduced into the social or 
 ganism by the automobile, and except in the 
 deep drifts of winter, the Ford car comes nearer 
 curing those ills than any other anti-toxin yet 
 discovered. 
 
 But here are the drifts still; and here is the old 
 question of going back to the city to escape 
 them. I shall sometimes wish we had gone back 
 as I start out on a snowy, blowy morning; but 
 never at night as I turn back there is that dif 
 ference between going to the city and going 
 home. I often think the trip in is worth while 
 for the sake of the trip out, such joy is it to pull 
 in from the black, soughing woods to the cheer 
 of the house, stamping the powdery snow off 
 your boots and greatcoat to the sweet din of wel 
 comes that drown the howling of the wind out 
 side. 
 
 Once last winter I had to walk from the sta 
 tion. The snow was deep and falling steadily 
 when I left the house in the morning, with in 
 creasing wind and thickening storm all day, so 
 that my afternoon train out was delayed and 
 dropped me at the station long after dark. 
 
204 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 The roads were blocked, the snow was knee- 
 deep, the driving wind was horizontal, and the 
 whirling ice particles like sharp sand, stinging, 
 blinding as I bent to the road. 
 
 I went forward leaning, the drag in my feet 
 overcome by the pull of the level wind on my 
 slant body. Once through the long stretch of 
 woods I tried to cut across the fields. Here I lost 
 my bearings, stumbled into a ditch, and for a 
 moment got utterly confused with the black of 
 the night, the bite of the cold, and the smothering 
 hand of the wind on my mouth. 
 
 Then I sat down where I was to pull myself 
 together. There might be danger in such a situa 
 tion, but I was not really cold not cool enough. 
 I had been forcing the fight foolishly, head-on, 
 by a frontal attack instead of on the enemy s flank. 
 
 Here in the meadow I was exposed to the full 
 force of the sweeping gale, and here I realized 
 for the first time that this was the great storm of 
 the winter, one of the supreme passages of the 
 year, and one of the glorious physical fights of 
 a lifetime. 
 
 On a prairie, or in the treeless barrens and 
 tundras of the vast, frozen North, a fight like this 
 
GOING BACK TO TOWN 205 
 
 could have but one end. What must the wild 
 polar night be like ! What the will, the thrill of 
 men like Scott and Peary who have fought these 
 forces to a standstill at the very poles ! Their 
 craft, their cunning, their daring, their imagina 
 tion! The sway, the drive, the divine madness 
 of such a purpose ! A living atom creeping across 
 the ice-cap over the top of the world ! A human 
 mote, so smothered in the Arctic dark and storm, 
 so wide of the utmost shore of men, by a trail so 
 far and filled and faint that only God can follow ! 
 
 It is not what a man does, but what he lives 
 through doing it. Life may be safer, easier, longer, 
 and fuller of possessions in one place than an 
 other. But possessions do not measure life, nor 
 years, nor ease, nor safety. Life in the Hingham 
 hills in winter is wretchedly remote at times, 
 but nothing happens to me all day long in Bos 
 ton to be compared for a moment with this expe 
 rience here in the night and snow. I never feel 
 the largeness of the sky there, nor the wideness 
 of the world, nor the loveliness of night, nor the 
 fearful majesty of such a winter storm. 
 
 As the far-flung lines swept down upon me 
 and bore me back into the drift, I knew some- 
 
ao6 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 what the fierce delight of berg and floe and that 
 primordial dark about the poles, and springing 
 from my trench, I flung myself single-handed and 
 exultant against the double fronts of night and 
 storm, mightier than they, till weak, but victori 
 ous, I dragged myself to the door of a neighbor 
 ing farmhouse, the voice of the storm a mighty 
 song within my soul. 
 
 This happened, as I say, once last winter, and 
 of course she said we simply ought not to live in 
 such a place in winter; and of course, if anything 
 exactly like that should occur every winter night, 
 I should have to move into the city whether I 
 liked city storms or not. One s life is, to be sure, a 
 consideration, but fortunately for life all the winter 
 days out here are not so magnificently ordered as 
 this, except at dawn each morning, and at dusk, 
 and at midnight when the skies are set with stars. 
 
 But there is a largeness to the quality of coun 
 try life, a freshness and splendor as constant as 
 the horizon and a very part of it. 
 
 Take a day anywhere in the year : that day in 
 March the day of the first frogs, when spring 
 and winter meet ; or that day in the fall the day 
 of the first frost, when autumn and winter meet ; 
 
GOING BACK TO TOWN 207 
 
 or that day in August the day of the full-blown 
 goldenrod, when summer and autumn meet 
 these, together with the days of June, and more 
 especially that particular day in June when you 
 can t tell earth from heaven, when everything is 
 life and love and song, and the very turtles of 
 the pond are moved from their lily-pads to wan 
 der the upland slopes to lay the day when 
 spring and summer meet! 
 
 Or if these seem rare days, try again anywhere 
 in the calendar from the rainy day in February 
 when the thaw begins to Indian summer and the 
 day of floating thistledown, and the cruising fleets 
 of wild lettuce and silky-sailed fireweed on the 
 golden air. The big soft clouds are sailing their 
 wider sea; the sweet sunshine, the lesser winds, 
 the chickadees and kinglets linger with you in 
 your sheltered hollow against the hill you and 
 they for yet a little slumber, a little sleep before 
 there breaks upon you the wrath of the North. 
 
 But is this sweet, slumberous, half-melancholy 
 day any nearer perfect than that day when 
 
 "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky 
 Arrives the snow 
 
 or the blizzard *? 
 
208 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 But going back to town, as she intimated, 
 concerns the children quite as much as me. They 
 travel eight miles a day to get to school, part of 
 it on foot and part of it by street car and were 
 absent one day last year when the telephone 
 wires were down and we thought there would 
 be no school because of the snow. They might 
 not have missed that one day had we been in the 
 city, and I must think of that when it comes 
 time to go back. There is room for them in the 
 city to improve in spelling and penmanship too, 
 vastly to improve. But they could n t have half so 
 much fun there as here, nor half so many things 
 to do, simple, healthful, homely, interesting things 
 to do, as good for them as books and food and 
 sleep these last things to be had here, too, in 
 great abundance. 
 
 What could take the place of the cow and 
 hens in the city? The hens are Mansie s (he is 
 the oldest) and the cow is mine. But night after 
 night last winter I would climb the Hill to see 
 the barn lighted, and in the shadowy stall two 
 little human figures one squat on an upturned 
 bucket milking, his milk-pail, too large to be held 
 between his knees, lodged perilously under the 
 
GOING BACK TO TOWN 209 
 
 cow upon a half-peck measure ; the other little 
 human figure quietly holding the cow s tail. 
 
 No head is turned; not a squeeze is missed 
 this is business here in the stall, but as the car 
 stops behind the scene, Babe calls 
 
 "Hello, Father!" 
 
 "Hello, Babe!" 
 
 "Three teats done," calls Mansie, his head down, 
 butting into the old cow s flank. " You go right 
 in, we 11 be there. She has n t kicked but once ! " 
 
 Perhaps that is n t a good thing for those two 
 little boys to do watering, feeding, brushing, 
 milking the cow on a winter night in order to 
 save me and loving to! Perhaps that is n t a 
 good thing for me to see them doing, as I get 
 home from the city on a winter night ! 
 
 But I am a sentimentalist and not proof at all 
 against two little boys milking, who are liable to 
 fall into the pail. 
 
 Meantime the two middlers had shoveled out 
 the road down to the mail-box on the street so 
 that I ran up on bare earth, the very wheels of 
 the car conscious of the love behind the shovels, 
 of the speed and energy it took to get the long 
 job done before I should arrive. 
 
210 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 " How did she come up ? " calls Beebum as he 
 opens the house door for me, his cheeks still 
 glowing with the cold and exercise. 
 
 "Did we give you wide enough swing at the 
 bend?" cries Bitsie, seizing the bag of bananas. 
 
 " Oh, we sailed up took that curve like a 
 bird didn t need chains just like a boule 
 vard right into the barn ! " 
 
 "It s a fearful night out, isn t it?" she says, 
 taking both of my hands in hers, a touch of awe, 
 a note of thankfulness in her voice. 
 
 " Bad night in Boston ! " I exclaim. " Trains 
 late, cars stalled streets blocked with snow. 
 I m mighty glad to be out here a night like 
 this." 
 
 "Woof! Woof !" And Babe and Pup are at 
 the kitchen door with the pail of milk, shaking 
 themselves free from snow. 
 
 "Where is Mansie?" his mother asks. 
 
 "He just ran down to have a last look at his 
 chickens." 
 
 We sit down to dinner, but Mansie does n t 
 come. The wind whistles outside, the snow 
 sweeps up against the windows, the night 
 grows wilder and fiercer. 
 
GOING BACK TO TOWN 211 
 
 "Why doesn t Mansie come*?" his mother 
 asks, looking at me. 
 
 " Oh, he can t shut the hen-house doors, for the 
 snow. He 11 be here in a moment." 
 
 The meal goes on. 
 
 " Will you go out and see what is the matter 
 with the child?" she asks, the look of anxiety 
 changing to one of alarm on her face. 
 
 As I am rising there is a racket in the cellar 
 and the child soon comes blinking into the 
 lighted dining-room, his hair dusty with snow, 
 his cheeks blazing, his eyes afire. He slips into 
 his place with just a hint of apology about him 
 and reaches for his cup of fresh, warm milk. 
 
 He is twelve years old. 
 
 " What does this mean, Mansie ? " she says. 
 
 " Nothing." 
 
 "You are late for dinner. And who knows 
 what had happened to you out there in the trees 
 a night like this. What were you doing?" 
 
 "Shutting up the chickens." 
 
 " But you did shut them up early in the after 
 noon." 
 
 "Yes, mother." 
 
 "Well?" 
 
THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 "It s awful cold, mother!" 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 " They might freeze ! " 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 " Specially those little ones." 
 
 " Yes, I know, but what took you so long ? " 
 
 " I did n t want em to freeze." 
 
 "Yes?" 
 
 " So I took a little one and put it on the roost 
 in between two big hens a little one and a big 
 one, a little one and a big one, to keep the little 
 ones warm ; and it took a lot of time." 
 
 " Will you have another cup of warm milk ? " 
 she asks, pouring him more from the pitcher, 
 doing very well with her lips and eyes, it seemed 
 to me, considering how she ran the cup over. 
 
 Shall I take them back to the city for the win 
 ter away from their chickens, and cow and dog 
 and pig and work-bench and haymow and fire 
 side, and the open air and their wild neighbors 
 and the wilder nights that I remember as a child? 
 
 * There is a pleasure in the pathless woods, 
 There is a rapture on the lonely shore, 
 There is society where none intrudes, 
 
 By the deep sea and music in its roar." 
 
GOING BACK TO TOWN 213 
 
 Once they have known all of this I can take them 
 into town and not spoil the poet in them. 
 
 "Make our boy interested in natural history 
 if you can. It is better than games. Keep him in 
 the open air. Above all, you must guard him 
 against indolence. Make him a strenuous man. 
 The great God has called me. Take comfort in 
 that I die in peace with the world and myself 
 and not afraid" from the last letter of Captain 
 Scott to his wife, as he lay watching the approach 
 of death in the Antarctic cold. His own end was 
 nigh, but the infant son, in whose life he should 
 never take a father s part, what should be his last 
 word for him? 
 
 "Make our boy interested in natural history 
 if you can. It is better than games. Keep him 
 in the open air." 
 
 Those are solemn words, and they carry a mes 
 sage of deep significance. I have watched my 
 own boys ; I recall my own boyhood ; and I be 
 lieve the words are true. So thoroughly do I be 
 lieve in the physical and moral value of the out 
 doors for children, the open fields and woods, 
 that before my children were all bom I brought 
 them here into the country. Here they shall grow 
 
214 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 as the weeds and flowers grow, and in the same 
 fields with them; here they shall play as the 
 young foxes and woodchucks play, and on the 
 same bushy hillsides with them summer and 
 winter. 
 
 Games are natural and good. It is a stick of a 
 boy who won t be " it." But there are better things 
 than games, more lasting, more developing, more 
 educating. Kittens and puppies and children 
 play; but children should have, and may have, 
 other and better things to do than puppies and 
 kittens can do ; for they are not going to grow 
 up into dogs and cats. 
 
 Once awaken a love for the woods in the heart 
 of a child, and something has passed into him that 
 the evil days, when they come, shall have to 
 reckon with. Let me take my children into the 
 country to live, if I can. Or if I cannot, then let 
 me take them on holidays, or, if it must be, on 
 Sunday mornings with me, for a tramp. 
 
 I bless those Sunday-morning tramps to the 
 Tumbling Dam Woods, to Sheppard s Mills, to 
 Cubby Hollow, to Cohansey Creek Meadows, 
 that I was taken upon as a lad of twelve. We 
 would start out early, and deep in the woods> or 
 
GOING BACK TO TOWN 215 
 
 by some pond or stream, or out upon the wide 
 meadows, we would wait, and watch the ways 
 of wild things the little marsh wrens bubbling 
 in the calamus and cattails, the young minks at 
 play, the big pond turtles on their sunning logs 
 these and more, a multitude more. Here we 
 would eat our crackers and the wild berries or 
 buds that we could find, and with the sunset 
 turn back toward home. 
 
 We saw this and that, single deep impressions, 
 that I shall always remember. But better than 
 any single sight, any sweet sound or smell, was 
 the sense of companionship with my human 
 guide, and the sense that I loved 
 
 "not man the less, but nature more, 
 From these our interviews." 
 
 If we do move into town this winter, it won t 
 be because the boys wish to go. 
 
XVI 
 THE CHRISTMAS TREE 
 
 E shall not go back to town before 
 Christmas, any way. They have a 
 big Christmas tree on the Common, 
 but the boys declare they had rather 
 have their own Christmas tree, no matter how 
 small ; rather go into the woods and mark it weeks 
 ahead, as we always do, and then go bring it 
 home the day before, than to look at the tallest 
 spruce that the Mayor could fetch out of the 
 forests of Maine and set up on the Common. 
 Where do such simple-minded children live, and 
 in such primitive conditions that they can carry 
 an axe into the woods these days and cut their 
 
THE CHRISTMAS TREE 217 
 
 own Christmas tree? Here on the Hills of Hing- 
 ham, almost twenty miles from Boston. 
 
 I hope it snows this Christmas as it did last. 
 How it snowed ! All day we waited a lull in the 
 gale, for our tree was still uncut, still out in the 
 Shanty-Field Woods. But all day long it blew, 
 and all day long the dry drifts swirled and eddied 
 into the deep hollows and piled themselves across 
 the ridge road into bluffs and headlands that had 
 to be cut and tunneled through. As the afternoon 
 wore on, the storm steadied. The wind came 
 gloriously through the tall woods, driving the 
 mingled snow and shadow till the field and the 
 very barn were blotted out. 
 
 " We must go ! " was the cry. " We 11 have 
 no Christmas tree ! " 
 
 "But this is impossible. We could never carry 
 it home through all this, even if we could find it." 
 
 "But we ve marked it!" 
 
 " You mean you have devoted it, hallowed it, 
 you little Aztecs! Do you think the tree will 
 mind ? " 
 
 "Why yes. Wouldn t you mind, father, 
 if you were a tree and marked for Christmas and 
 nobody came for you ? " 
 
2i8 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 " Perhaps I would yes, I think you re right. 
 It is too bad. But we 11 have to wait." 
 
 We waited and waited, and for once they 
 went to bed on Christmas Eve with their tree 
 uncut. They had hardly gone, however, when I 
 took the axe and the lantern (for safety) and 
 started up the ridge for the devoted tree. I found 
 it; got it on my shoulder; and long after nine 
 o clock as snowy and as weary an old Chris 
 as ever descended a chimney came dragging 
 in the tree. 
 
 We got to bed late that night as all parents 
 ought on the night before Christmas; but Old 
 Chris himself, soundest of sleepers, never slept 
 sounder! And what a Christmas Day we had. 
 What a tree it was! Who got it? How? No, 
 old Chris did n t bring it not when two of the 
 boys came floundering in from a walk that after 
 noon saying they had tracked me from the cellar 
 door clear out to the tree-stump where they 
 found my axe ! 
 
 I hope it snows. Christmas ought to have 
 snow ; as it ought to have holly and candles and 
 stockings and mistletoe and a tree. I wonder if 
 England will send us mistletoe this year? Per- 
 
THE CHRISTMAS TREE 219 
 
 haps we shall have to use our home-grown; but 
 then, mistletoe is mistletoe, and one is n t asking 
 one s self what kind of mistletoe hangs overhead 
 when one chances to get under the chandelier. 
 They tell me there are going to be no toys this 
 year, none of old Chris s kind but only weird, 
 fierce, Fourth-of-July things from Japan. " Christ 
 mas comes but once a year," my elders used to 
 say to me a strange, hard saying; yet not so 
 strange and hard as the feeling that somehow, 
 this year, Christmas may not come at all. I never 
 felt that way before. It will never do ; and I shall 
 hang up my stocking. Of course they will have 
 a tree at church for the children, as they did last 
 year, but will the choir sing this year, "While 
 shepherds watched their flock by night" and 
 "Hark! the herald angels sing"? 
 
 I have grown suddenly old. The child that 
 used to be in me is with the ghost of Christ 
 mas Past, and I am partner now with Scrooge, 
 taking old Marley s place. The choir may sing; 
 but 
 
 " The lonely mountains o er 
 And the resounding shore 
 A voice of weeping heard and loud lament !" 
 
220 THE HILLS OF HINGHAM 
 
 I cannot hear the angels, nor see, for the flames 
 of burning cities, their shining ranks descend the 
 sky. 
 
 "No war, or battle* s sound, 
 Was heard the world around ; 
 The idle spear and shield were high uphung " 
 
 on that first Christmas Eve. What has happened 
 since then since I was a child ? since last 
 Christmas, when I still believed in Christmas, 
 and sang with the choir, " Noel ! Noel ! "? 
 
 But I am confusing sentiment and faith. If I 
 cannot sing peace on earth, I still believe in it; if I 
 cannot hear the angels, I know that the Christ was 
 born, and that Christmas is coming. It will not 
 be a very merry Christmas; but it shall be a most 
 significant, most solemn, most holy Christmas. 
 
 The Yule logs, as the Yule-tide songs, will 
 be fewer this year. Many a window, bright with 
 candles a year ago, will be darkened. There will 
 be no goose at the Cratchits , for both Bob and 
 Master Cratchit have gone to the front. But Tiny 
 Tim is left, and the Christ Child is left, and my 
 child is left, and yours even your dear dream- 
 child " upon the tedious shores of Lethe " that 
 always comes back at Christmas. It takes only 
 
THE CHRISTMAS TREE 221 
 
 one little child to make Christmas one little 
 child, and the angels who companion him, and 
 the shepherds who come to see him, and the 
 Wise Men who worship him and bring him gifts. 
 
 We can have Christmas, for unto us again, as 
 truly as in Bethlehem of Judea, a child is bom 
 on whose shoulders shall be the government and 
 whose name is the Prince of Peace. 
 
 Christ is reborn with every child, and Christ 
 mas is his festival. Come, let us keep it for his 
 sake ; for the children s sake ; for the sake of the 
 little child that we must become before we can 
 enter into the Kingdom of Heaven. It is neither 
 kings nor kaisers, but a little child that shall lead 
 us finally. And long after the round-lipped can 
 nons have ceased to roar, we shall hear the Christ 
 mas song of the Angels. 
 
 " But see ! the Virgin blest 
 Hath laid her Babe to rest " 
 
 Come, softly, swiftly, dress up the tree, hang 
 high the largest stockings; bring out the toys 
 softly ! 
 
 I hope it snows. 
 
 THE END 
 
(fcbe 
 
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