THE HILLS OF HINGHAM

BY

DALLAS LORE SHARP

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published April 1916_

TO THOSE WHO

"_Enforst to seek some shelter nigh at hand_"

HAVE FOUND THE HILLS OF HINGHAM

PREFACE

The is not exactly the book I thought it was going to be--though I cansay the same of its author for that matter. I had intended this bookto set forth some features of the Earth that make it to be preferred toHeaven as a place of present abode, and to note in detail the peculiarattractions of Hingham over Boston, say, --Boston being quite the bestcity 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 intoBelgium, and Heaven began to seem the better place. Meanwhile, aseries of lesser local troubles had been brewing--drouth, caterpillars, rheumatism, increased commutation rates, more college themes, --morethan I could carry back and forth to Hingham, --so that as the writingwent on Boston began to seem, not a better place than Hingham, but anearer place, somehow, and more thoroughly sprayed. 

And all this time the book on Life that I thought I was writing wasgrowing chapter by chapter into a defense of that book--a defense ofLife--my life here by my fireside with my boys and Her, and the gardenand woodlot and hens and bees, and days off and evenings at home andbooks to read, yes, and books to write--all of which I had taken forgranted 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 oneto be--while the adventure in contentment was still an adventure, whilethe lure of the land was of fourteen acres yet unexplored, while backto the soil meant exactly what the seed catalogues picture it, and mysummer in a garden had not yet passed into its frosty fall. Instead, Ihave done what no writer ought to do, what none ever did before, unlessJacob wrote, --taken a fourteen-year-old enthusiasm for my theme, tofind the enthusiasm grown, as Rachel must have grown by the time Jacobgot her, into a philosophy, and like all philosophies, in need ofdefense. 

What men live by is an interesting speculative question, but what menlive on, and where they can live, --with children to bring up, and theirown souls to save, --is an intensely practical question which I havebeen working at these fourteen years here in the Hills of Hingham. 

CONTENTS

 I. THE HILLS OF HINGHAM II. THE OPEN FIRE III. THE ICE CROP IV. SEED CATALOGUES V. THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER VI. SPRING PLOUGHING VII. MERE BEANS VIII. A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE IX. THE HONEY FLOW X. A PAIR OF PIGS XI. LEAFING XII. THE LITTLE FOXES XIII. OUR CALENDAR XIV. THE FIELDS OF FODDER XV. GOING BACK TO TOWN XVI. THE CHRISTMAS TREE

[Illustration: The hills of Hingham]

I

THE HILLS OF HINGHAM

 "As Surrey hills to mountains grew In White of Selborne's loving view"

Really there are no hills in Hingham, to speak of, except Bradley Hilland Peartree Hill and Turkey Hill, and Otis and Planter's and ProspectHills, Hingham being more noted for its harbor and plains. Everybodyhas heard of Hingham smelts. Mullein Hill is in Hingham, too, butMullein Hill is only a wrinkle on the face of Liberty Plain, whichaccounts partly for our having it. Almost anybody can have a hill inHingham who is content without elevation, a surveyor's term as appliedto hills, and a purely accidental property which is not at allessential to real hillness, or the sense of height. We have a stump onMullein Hill for height. A hill in Hingham is not only possible, buteven practical as compared with a Forest in Arden, Arden beingaltogether 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 inHingham, and it would be more ideal, too, if New England weather werenot 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 twentyor thereabouts, and when every wild-cherry-bush was an olive tree. Butone day the tent caterpillar like a wolf swept down on our fold ofcherry-bushes and we fled Arden, never to get back. We lived for atime in town and bought olives in bottles, stuffed ones sometimes, thenwe got a hill in Hingham, just this side of Arden, still buying ourolives, but not our apples now, nor our peaches, nor our musk melons, nor our wood for the open fire. We buy commutation tickets, and paydearly for the trips back and forth. But we could n't make a living inArden. Our hill in Hingham is a compromise. 

Only folk of twenty and close to twenty live in Arden. We are fortynow and no longer poets. When we are really old and our grasshoppersbecome a burden, we may go back to town where the insects are anentirely different species; but for this exceedingly busy present, between our fading dawn of visions and our coming dusk of dreams, ahill 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. Notthat 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 bringthem to the foot of the hill. We people of the hills do not hateeither crowds or neighbors. We are neighbors ourselves and parts ofthe city crowds too; and we love to bind up wounds and bring folk totheir inns. But we cannot take them farther, for there are no inns outhere. We leave them in Hingham and journey on alone into a regionwhere neither thief nor anyone infests the roadsides; where there areno roads in fact, but only driftways and footpaths through the sparselysettled hills. 

We leave the crowd on the streets, we leave the kind neighbor at hisfront gate, and travel on, not very far, but on alone into a wide quietcountry where we shall have a chance, perhaps, of meeting withourselves--the day's great adventure, and far to find; yet this is whatwe have come out to the hills for. 

Not for apples nor wood fires have we a hill in Hingham; not for hensand a bigger house, and leisure, and conveniences, and excitements; notfor ways to earn a living, nor for ways to spend it. Stay in town forthat. 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 treesholding out pathetic frozen branches for sympathy. Impossible to beintrospective here. Fall into a brown or blue study and you are likelyto be run over. Thought is brought to the surface by mental massage. No time to dwell upon your beloved self. So many more interestingthings to think about. And the changing scenes unfold more rapidlythan a moving-picture reel. "

This sounds much more interesting than the country. And it is moreinteresting, Broadway asking nothing of a country lane for excitement. And back they go who live on excitement; while some of us take thissame excitement as the best of reasons for double windows and stormdoors 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 externalexcitement the cause or the concomitant of thought. In fact this"mental massage" of the city is to real thinking about what amustard-plaster is to circulation--a counter-irritant. The thinker isone who finds himself (quite impossible on Broadway!); and then findshimself _interesting_--more interesting than Broadway--anotherimpossibility within the city limits. Only in the country can he dothat, in a wide and negative environment of quiet, room, andisolation--necessary conditions for the enjoyment of one's own mind. Thought is a country product and comes in to the city for distribution, as books are gathered and distributed by libraries, but not written inlibraries. It is against the wide, drab background of the country thatthought most naturally reacts, thinking being only the excitement of aman discovering himself, as he is compelled to do, where bendinghorizon and arching sky shift as he shifts in all creation's constantendeavor to swing around and center on him. Nothing centers on him inthe city, where he thinks by "mental massage"--through the scalp withlaying on of hands, as by benediction or shampoo. 

But for the busy man, say of forty, are the hills of Hingham with theiradventure possible? Why, there is nothing ailing the man of fortyexcept 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 ofGod's people, if the Philistines were (He brought them from Caphtor)and the Syrians (those He brought from Kir). The man of forty has aright to so much of the Promised Land as a hill in Hingham. But he isafraid to possess it because it is so far from work and friends andlighted streets. He is afraid of the dark and of going off to sit downupon a stump for converse with himself. He is afraid he won't get hiswork done. If his work were planting beans, he would get none plantedsurely while on the stump; but so he might be saved the ungracious taskof giving away his surplus beans to bean-ridden friends for the summer. A man, I believe, can plant too many beans. He might not finish thefreshman themes either. But when was the last freshman theme everdone? Finish them if he can, he has only baked the freshmen intosophomores, and so emptied the ovens for another batch of dough. Heshall never put a crust on the last freshman, and not much of a cruston the last sophomore either, the Almighty refusing to coöperate withhim 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 andsit down. 

College students also are a part of that world which can be too muchwith us, cabbages, too, if we are growing cabbages. We don't doover-much, but we are over-busy. We want too much. Buy a little hillin Hingham, and even out here, unless you pray and go apart often toyour stump, your desire will be toward every hill in sight and thevalleys between. 

According to the deed my hill comprises "fourteen acres more or less"of an ancient glacier, a fourteen-acre heap of unmitigated gravel, which now these almost fourteen years I have been trying to clear ofstones, picking, picking for a whole Stone Age, and planning daily tobuy the nine-acre ridge adjoining me which is gravelier than mine. Byactual count we dumped five hundred cartloads of stones into thefoundation of a porch when making over the house recently--and still Iam out in the garden picking, picking, living in the Stone Age still, and planning to prolong the stay by nine acres more that are worse thanthese I now have, nine times worse for stones!

I shall never cease picking stones, I presume, but perhaps I can getout a permanent injunction against myself, to prevent my buying thatneighboring gravel hill, and so find time to climb my own and sit downamong the beautiful moth-infested oak trees. 

I do sit down, and I thrust my idle hands hard into my pockets to keepthem from the Devil who would have them out at the moths instantly--anevil job, killing moths, worse than picking stones!

Nothing is more difficult to find anywhere than time to sit down withyourself, except the ability to enjoy the time after finding it, --evenhere on a hill in Hingham, if the hill is in woods. There are foes toface in the city and floods to stem out here, but let no one try tofight several acres of caterpillars. When you see them coming, climbyour stump and wait on the Lord. He is slow; and the caterpillars arehorribly fast. True. Yet I say. To your stump and wait--and learnhow restful a thing it is to sit down by faith. For the town sprayeris a vain thing. The roof of green is riddled. The rafters overheadreach out as naked as in December. Ruin looks through. On sweep thedevouring hosts in spite of arsenate of lead and "wilt" disease andCalasoma beetles. Nothing will avail; nothing but a new woodlotplanted with saplings that the caterpillars do not eat. Sit still mysoul, and know that when these oak trees fall there will come up thefir tree and the pine tree and the shagbark, distasteful to the worms;and they shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign thatshall not be cut off. 

This is good forestry, and good philosophy--a sure handling of bothworms and soul. 

But how hard to follow! I would so like to help the Lord. Not to domy 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 Iwas forced to rest upon the stump, when I saw what I had been blind tobefore: that the pine trees were tipped with cones, and that there inthe tops were the red squirrels shucking and giving the winged seeds tothe winds to sow; and that even now up the wooded slope below me, wherethe first of the old oaks had perished, was climbing a future grove ofseedling pines. 

The forests of Arden are not infested with gypsy moths, nor the woodsof Heaven either, I suppose; but the trees in the hills of Hingham are. And yet they are the trees of the Lord; the moths are his also, and thecaring 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 thenight-shift; for it was He who instituted the twilight, and it is Hewho must needs be responsible till the morning. 

So here a-top my stump in the beleaguered woodlot I sit with idlehands, and no stars falling, and the universe turning all alone!

To wake up at forty a factory hand! a floor-walker! a banker! a collegeprofessor! a man about town or any other respectably successful, humdrum, square wooden peg-of-a-thing in a square tight hole! There isan evil, says the Preacher, which I have seen under the sun--the man ofabout forty who has become moderately successful and automatic, but whohas not, and now knows he cannot, set the world on fire. This is avanity and it is an evil disease. 

From running the universe at thirty the man of forty finds himselfrunning with it, paced before, behind, and beside, by other runners andby 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 amongthe medals. This is an evil thing. Forty is a dangerous age. Thewild 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 hasthe dash in hand; old age has ceased to worry and is walking in; whilethe man of forty is right in the middle of the run, grinding along onhis second wind with the cheering all ahead of him. 

In fact, the man of forty finds himself half-way across the street withthe baby carriage in his hands, and touring cars in front of him, andlimousines behind him, and the hand-of-the-law staying and steadyinghim on his perilous course. 

Life may be no busier at forty than at thirty, but it is certainly moreexpensive. Work may not be so hard, but the facts of life are a greatdeal harder, the hardest, barest of them being the here-and-now of allthings, the dead levelness of forty--an irrigated plain that has nohill of vision, no valley of dream. But it may have its hill inHingham with a bit of meadow down below. 

Mullein Hill is the least of all hills, even with the added stump; butlooking down through the trees I can see the gray road, and anoccasional touring car, like a dream, go by; and off on the Blue Hillsof Milton--higher hills than ours in Hingham--hangs a purple mist thatfrom our ridge seems the very robe and veil of vision. 

The realities are near enough to me here crawling everywhere, indeed;but close as I am to the flat earth I can yet look down at things--atthe road and the passing cars; and off at things--the hills and thedistant horizon; and so I can escape for a time that level stare intothe face of things which sees them as _things_ close and real, butseldom as _life_, far off and whole. 

Perhaps I have never seen life whole; I may need a throne and not ahill 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, Isometimes see life free, not free from men and things, butunencumbered, coming to meet me out of the morning and passing on withme toward the sunset until, at times, the stepping westward, theuneventful onwardness of life has

 ". . . Seemed to be A kind of heavenly destiny"

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 occasionally that you are greater than your rhetoric, oryour acres of stones, or your woods of worms, worms that may destroyyour trees though you spray, is to steady and establish your soul, andvastly to comfort it!

To be greater than your possessions, than your accomplishments, thanyour desires--greater than you know, than anybody at home knows or willadmit! So great that you can leave your plough in the turret that youcan leave the committees to meet, and the trees to fall, and the sun tohurry on, while you take your seat upon a stump, assured from many adismaying observation that the trees will fall anyhow, that the sunwill hasten on its course, and that the committees, even thecommittees, will meet and do business whether you attend or not!

This is bed-rock fact, the broad and solid bottom for a cheerfulphilosophy. To know that they can get on without you (more knowledgethan many ever attain!) is the beginning of wisdom; and to learn thatyou can get on without them--at the close of the day, and out here onyour 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 thecollege can so calmly move on without me, how small I am! Let me hopethat I am useful there, and useful as a citizen-at-large; but I knowthat I am chiefly and utterly dispensable at large, everywhere atlarge, even in Hingham. But not here on my hilltop. Here I amindispensable. In the short shift from my classroom, from chair tohill, from doing to being, I pass from a means into an end, from a partin the scheme of things to the scheme of things itself. 

Here stands my hill on the highway from dawn to dusk, and just wherethe bending walls of the sky center and encircle it. This is not onlya 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 crookedroad over which I travel daily. 

I can trace the run of the road from my stump on the hill, off to whereit bends on the edge of night for its returning and rest here. 

 "Let me live in a house by the aide of the road, "

sings the poet; but as for me, after traveling all day let me come backto a house at the end of the road--for in returning and rest shall aman be saved, in quietness and confidence shall he find strength. Nowhere shall he find that quietness and confidence in larger measurethan here in the hills. And where shall he return to more rest?

There are men whose souls are like these hills, simple, strong, quietmen who can heal and restore; and there are books that help like thehills, simple elemental, large books; music, and sleep, and prayer, andplay are healing too; but none of these cure and fill one with aquietness and confidence as deep as that from the hills, even from thelittle hills and the small fields and the vast skies of Hingham; aconfidence and joy in the earth, perhaps, rather than in heaven, andyet in heaven too. 

If it is not also a steadied thinking and a cleared seeing, it is atleast a mental and moral convalescence that one gets--out of thelandscape, out of its largeness, sweetness and reality. I am quicklyconscious on the hills of space all about me--room for myself, room forthe things that crowd and clutter me; and as these arrange and setthemselves in order, I am aware of space within me, of freedom andwideness there, of things in order, of doors unlocked and windowsopened, through which I look out upon a new young world, new like themorning, young like the seedling pines on the slope--young and new likemy 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 havefaith--as if my chair were a stump, my classroom a wooded hillsidecovered with young pines, seedlings of the Lord, and full of sap, andproof against the worm. 

Yet these are the same youth who yesterday wrote the "Autobiography ofa Fountain Pen" and "The Exhilarations of the Straw-Ride" and theessays on "The Beauties of Nature. " It is I who am not the same. Ihave been changed, renewed, having seen from my stump the face ofeternal youth in the freshmen pines marching up the hillside, in theyoung brook playing and pursuing through the meadow, in the young windsover the trees, the young stars in the skies, the young moon ridingalong the horizon

 "With the auld moon in her arm"--

youth immortal, and so, unburdened by its withered load of age. 

I come down from the hill with a soul resurgent, --strong like the heavethat overreaches the sag of the sea, --and bold in my faith--to a lot ofcollege students as the hope of the world!

From the stump in the woodlot I see not only the face of things but thecourse of things, that they are moving past me, over me, and round andround me their fixed center--for the horizon to bend about, for the skyto arch over, for the highways to start from, for every influence andinterest 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 andBoston, --for a day, for six months in the winter even, --but we need toget back to the hills at night. We are a conventional, gregarious, herding folk. Let an American get rich and he builds a grand house inthe city. Let an Englishman get rich and he moves straight into thecountry--out to such a spot as Bradley Hill in Hingham. 

There are many of the city's glories and conveniences lacking here onMullein Hill, but Mullein Hill has some of the necessities that arelacking in the city--wide distances and silent places, and woods andstumps where you can sit down and feel that you are greater thananything in sight. In the city the buildings are too vast; the peopleare too many. You might feel greater than any two or three personsthere, perhaps, but not greater than nearly a million. 

No matter how centered and serene I start from Hingham, a little wayinto Boston and I am lost. First I begin to hurry (a thing unnecessaryin Hingham) for everybody else is hurrying; then I must get somewhere;everybody else is getting somewhere, getting everywhere. For see themin front of me and behind me, getting there ahead of me and comingafter me to leave no room for me when I shall arrive! But when shall Iand where shall I arrive? And what shall I arrive for? And who am Ithat I would arrive? I look around for the encircling horizon, and upfor the overarching sky, and in for the guiding purpose; but instead ofa purpose I am hustled forward by a crowd, and at the bottom of astreet far down beneath such overhanging walls as leave me but a slitof smoky sky. I am in the hands of a force mightier than I, in thehands of the police force at the street corners, and am carried acrossto the opposite curb through a breaker that rolls in front of me againat 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 Library, "where is all therecorded wit of the world, but none of the recording, "--whereShakespeare and Old Sleuth and Pansy look all alike and as readable asthe card catalogues, or the boy attendants, or the signs of the Zodiacin the vestibule 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 outside!And how dead they are in here, wedged side by side in this vastsepulcher of human thought!

I move among them dully, the stir of the streets coming to me as thesoughing 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 inscriptioncuriously. I must have written it--when I was alive aeons ago, and farfrom here. But why did I? For see the unread, the shelved, thenumbered, the buried books!

Let me out to the street! Dust we are, not books, and unto dust, goodfertile soil, not paper and ink, we shall return. No more writing forme--but breathing and eating and jostling with the good earthy peopleoutside, laughing and loving and dying with them!

The sweet wind in Copley Square! The sweet smell of gasoline! Thesweet scream of electric horns!

And how sweet--how fat and alive and friendly the old colored hackdriver, 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 isno book, but just a good black human being. I rush up and shake handswith him. He nearly falls into his cab with astonishment; but I mustget hold of life 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'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 thingonce more with face toward--the hills of Hingham. 

It is five o'clock, and a winter evening, and all the street poursforth to meet me--some of them coming with me bound for Hingham, surely, as all of them are bound for a hill somewhere and a home. 

I love the city at this winter hour. This home-hurrying crowd--itsexcitement of escape! its eagerness and expectancy! its camaraderie!The arc-lights overhead glow and splutter with the joy they see on thefaces beneath them. 

It is nearly half-past five as I turn into Winter Street. Now the verystores are closing. Work has ceased. Drays and automobiles are gone. The two-wheeled fruit man is going from his stand at the Subwayentrance. The street is filled from wall to wall with men and women, young women and young men, fresher, more eager, more excited, morejoyous even than the lesser crowd of shoppers down Boylston Street. They don't notice me particularly. No one notices any oneparticularly, for the lights overhead see us all, and we all understandas we cross and dodge and lockstep and bump and jostle through thisdeep narrow place of closing doors toward home. Then the last rush atthe station, that nightly baptism into human brotherhood as we plungeinto the crowd and are carried through the gates and into ourtrain--which is speeding far out through the dark before I begin tocome to myself--find myself leaving the others, separating, individualizing, taking on definite shape and my own being. The trainis grinding in at my station, and I drop out along the track in thedark alone. 

I gather my bundles and hug them to me, feeling not the bread andbananas, but only the sense of possession, as I step off down thetrack. Here is my automobile. Two miles of back-country road liebefore me. I drive slowly, the stars overhead, but not far away, andvery close about me the deep darkness of the woods--and silence andspace and shapes invisible, and voices inaudible as yet to mycity-dinned ears and staring eyes. But sight returns, and hearing, till soon my very fingers, feeling far into the dark, begin to see andhear. 

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 treesshines my light. They are expecting me, She, and the boys, and thedog, and the blazing fire, the very trees up there, and the watchingstars. 

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 wereall waiting for _it_! As they are, of course, it and me. I open upthe throttle, I jam the shrieking whistle, and rip around the bend inthe middle of the hill, --puppy yelping down to meet me. The noise wemake as the lights flash on, as the big door rolls back, and we come toour nightly standstill inside the boy-filled barn! They drag me fromthe wheel--puppy yanking at my trouser leg; they pounce upon mybundles; they hustle me toward the house, where, in the lighted doorwaymore welcome waits me--and questions, batteries of them, even puppyjoining the attack!

Who would have believed I had seen and done all this, --had any suchadventurous trip, --lived any such significant day, --catching my regular8. 35 train as I did!

But we get through the dinner and some of the talk and then theout-loud reading before the fire; then while she is tucking thechildren 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. Thehill-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 thenight. A train rumbles somewhere in the distance, then the silence andspace reach off through the shadows, infinitely far off down thehillside; and the stars gather in the tops of the trees. 

[Illustration: The open fire]

II

THE OPEN FIRE

It 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 ghostlyshapes pass by, ghostly faces press against the window, and at thecorners of the house ghostly voices pause for parley, muttering thicklythrough the swirl and smother of the snow. Inside burns the fire, kindling into glorious pink and white peonies on the nearest wall andglowing warm and sweet on her face as she reads. The children are inbed. She is reading aloud to me:

"'I wish the good old times would come again, ' she said, 'when we werenot quite so rich. I do not mean that I want to be poor, but there wasa 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?" Iasked. 

The gleam of the fire, or perhaps a fancy out of the far-beyond, lighted her eyes as she answered, "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 wecould--"

"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 thefire, just where the boys had left them at the end of their listeningan hour before. 

"If you had allowed me, " she went on, "I was going to say how glad weought to be that we are not quite so rich as--"

"We should like to be?" I questioned. 

"'A purchase'"--she was reading again--"'is but a purchase, now thatyou 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 threadbare--andall because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher which you dragged homelate at night from Barker's in Covent Garden? Do you remember how weeyed 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 theSaturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing--'

"Is n't this exactly our case?" she asked, interrupting herself for noother purpose than to prolong the passage she was reading. 

"Truly, " I replied, trying hard to hide a note of eagerness in myvoice, for I had kept my battery masked these many months, "only Lambwanted an old folio, whereas we need a new car. I have driven that oldmachine for five years and it was second-hand to begin with. "

I watched for the effect of the shot, but evidently I had not got therange, for she was saying. 

"Is there a sweeter bit in all of 'Elia' than this, do you think"?

"'--And when the old bookseller with some grumbling opened his shop, and by the twinkling taper (for he was setting bedwards) lighted outthe 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 ofyour author! to draw out the linked sweetness of a passage to itslongest--there reads your loving reader!

"You see, " laying her hand on mine, "old books and old friends arebest, and I should think you had really rather have a nice safe old carthan any new one. Thieves don't take old cars, as you know. And youcan't insure them, that's a comfort! And cars don't skid and collidejust because they are _old_, do they? And you never have to scold thechildren about the paint and--and the old thing _does_ go--what do youthink Lamb would say about old cars?"

"Lamb be hanged on old cars!" and I sent the sparks flying with a freshstick. 

"Well, then let's hear the rest of him on 'Old _China_. '" And so sheread, while the fire burned, and outside swept the winter storm. 

I have a weakness for out-loud reading and Lamb, and a peculiar joy inwood fires when the nights are dark and snowy. My mind is not, afterall, _much_ set on automobiles then; there is such a difference betweena wild January night on Mullein Hill and an automobile show--or anyother show. If St. Bernard of Cluny had been an American and not amonk, I think Jerusalem the Golden might very likely have been a quietlittle town like Hingham, all black with a winter night and lighted forthe Saint with a single open fire. Anyhow I cannot imagine themansions of the Celestial City without fireplaces. I don't know howthe equatorial people do; I have never lived on the equator, and I haveno desire to--nor in any other place where it is too hot for afireplace, or where wood is so scarce that one is obliged to substitutea gas-log. I wish I could build an open hearth into every lowly homeand give every man who loves out-loud reading a copy of Lamb and sticksenough for a fire. I wish--is it futile to wish that besides thefireplace and the sticks I might add a great many more winter eveningsto the round of the year? I would leave the days as they are in theirbeautiful 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 gowith them. 

And I often wonder if more men might not supply these things forthemselves? There are January nights for all, and space enough outsideof city and suburb for simple firesides; books enough also; yes, andreaders-aloud if they are given the chance. But the boys are hard toget. They might even come girls. Well, what is the difference, anyway? Suppose mine had been dear things with ribbons in theirhair--not these four, but four more? Then all the glowing circle aboutthe fireplace had been filled, the chain complete, a link of fine goldfor every link of steel! Ah! the cat hath nine lives, as Phisologussaith; but a man hath as many lives as he hath sons, with two livesbesides for every daughter. So it must always seem to me when Iremember the precious thing that vanished from me before I could evenlay her in her mother's arms. She would have been, I think, a fullhead 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 thoughthey include children and an automobile. Second-hand cars are verycheap, and the world seems full of orphans--how many orphans now! Itis n't a question of getting the things; the question is, What are thenecessary things?

First, I say, a fireplace. A man does well to build his fireplacefirst instead of the garage. Better than a roof over one's head is afire at one's feet; for what is there deadlier than the chill of afireless house? The fireplace first, unless indeed 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 ofold 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 thefront gate. He held a pair of brass-headed hearth tongs above hishead, 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 theauctioneer. "Will somebody throw in the fireplace to go with them!"

I took my tongs rather sheepishly, I fear, rather helplessly, and gotback 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, notknowing why, not wishing to throw them into the briers for they werevery old and full of story, and I--was very young and full of--I cannottell, remembering what little _boys_ are made of. And now here theylean against the hearth, that very pair. I packed them in the bottomof my trunk when I started for college; I saved them through the yearswhen our open fire was a "base-burner, " and then a gas-radiator in acity flat. Moved, preserved, "married" these many years, they stand atlast 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 amarried old pair of brass-headed hearth tongs that a boy in his teensshould have bought them at auction and then have carried them tocollege with him, rattling about on the bottom of his trunk? For itwas not an over-packed trunk. There were the tongs on the bottom and athirty-cent edition of "The Natural History of Selborne" on thetop--that is all. That is all the boy remembers. These two things, atleast, are all that now remain out of the trunkful he started with fromhome--the tongs for sentiment, and for friendship the book. 

"Are you listening?" she asks, looking up to see if I have gone tosleep. 

"Yes, I 'm listening. "

"And dreaming?"

"Yes, dreaming a little, too, --of you, dear, and the tongs there, andthe boys upstairs, and the storm outside, and the fire, and of thissweet room, --an old, old dream that I had years and years ago, --allcome 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 alittle, too, perhaps. "

There is something in the fire and the rise and fall of her voice, something so infinitely soothing in its tones, and in Lamb, and in sucha night as this--so vast and fearful, but so futile in its bitter sweepabout the fire--that while one listens one must really dream too. 

[Illustration: The ice crop]

III

THE ICE CROP

The ice-cart with its weighty tongs never climbs our Hill, yet theicechest does not lack its clear blue cake of frozen February. Wegather our own ice as we gather our own hay and apples. The smallice-house under the trees has just been packed with eighteen tons of"black" ice, sawed and split into even blocks, tier on tier, theharvest of the curing cold, as loft and cellar are still filled withcrops made in the summer's curing heat. So do the seasons overlap andrun together! So do they complement and multiply each other! Like thestar-dust of Saturn they belt our fourteen-acre planet, not with threerings, nor four, but with twelve, a ring for every month, a girdle oftwelve shining circles running round the year--the tinkling ice ofFebruary in the goblet of October!--the apples of October red and ripeon what might have been April's empty platter!

He who sows the seasons and gathers the months into ice-house and barnlives not from sunup to sundown, revolving with the hands of the clock, but, heliocentric, makes a daily circuit clear around the sun--thesmell of mint in the hay-mow, a reminder of noontime passed; theprospect of winter in the growing garden, a gentle warning of nightcoming on. Twelve times one are twelve--by so many times are monthsand meanings and values multiplied for him whose fourteen acres bringforth abundantly--provided that the barns on the place be kept safelysmall. 

Big barns are an abomination unto the Lord, and without place on a wiseman's estate. As birds have nests, and foxes dens, so may any man havea place to lay his head, with a _mansion_ prepared in the sky for hissoul. 

Big barns are as foolish for the ice-man as for others. The barns ofan ice-man must needs be large, yet they are over-large if he can sayto 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 hestill 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 anything of that sort in great quantities. He who buildsgreat barns for ice, builds a refrigerator for his soul. Ice mustnever 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 forhim, but always at February or when the ice is making and the mercuryis 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 (shrinkageand Sunday ice-cream and other extras provided for). Such an ice-houseis not only an ice-house, it is also an act of faith, an avowal ofconfidence in the stability of the frame of things, and in theirorderly continuance. Another winter will come, it proclaims, when theponds will be pretty sure to freeze. If they don't freeze, and neverdo again--well, who has an ice-house big enough in that event?

My ice-house is one of life's satisfactions; not architecturally, ofcourse, for there has been no great development yet in ice-house lines, and this one was home-done; it is a satisfaction morally, being onething I have done that is neither more nor less. I have the big-barnweakness--the desire for ice--for ice to melt--as if I were no wiserthan the ice-man! I builded bigger than I knew when I put the stoneporches about the dwelling-house, consulting in my pride the architectfirst instead of the town assessors. I took no counsel of pride inbuilding the ice-house, nor of fear, nor of my love of ice. I said: "Iwill 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 facingseven hot and iceless years. I have laid up enough things among themoths and rust. Ice against the rainy day I will provide, but ice formy children and my children's children, ice for a possible cosmicreversal that might twist the equator over the poles, I will notprovide for. Nor will I go into the ice business. "

Nor did I! And I say the building of that ice-house has been animmense 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 asnot 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 tome the thing. 

I can fill the house in a single day, and so trade a day for a year; oris it not rather that I crowd a year into a day? Such days arepossible. It is not any day that I can fill the ice-house. Ice-day isa chosen, dedicated day, one of the year's high festivals, the Day ofFirst Fruits, the ice crop being the year's earliest harvest. Hay ismade when the sun shines, a condition sometimes slow in coming; but iceof the right quality and thickness, with roads right, and sky right forharvesting, requires a conjunction of right conditions so difficult asto make a good ice-day as rare as a day in June. June! why, June knowsno such glorious weather as that attending the harvest of the ice. 

This year it fell early in February--rather late in the season; solate, in fact, that, in spite of my faith in winter, I began to growanxious--something no one on a hill in Hingham need ever do. Since NewYear's Day unseasonable weather had prevailed: shifty winds, uncertainskies, rain and snow and sleet--that soft, spongy weather when the icesoaks and grows soggy. By the middle of January what little ice therehad been in the pond was gone, and the ice-house was still empty. 

Toward the end of the month, however, the skies cleared, the windsettled steadily into the north, and a great quiet began to deepen overthe fields, a quiet that at night grew so tense you seemed to hear theclose-glittering heavens snapping with the light of the stars. Everything seemed charged with electric cold; the rich soil of thegarden struck fire like flint beneath your feet; the tall hillsidepines, as stiff as masts of steel, would suddenly crack in the brittlesilence, with a sharp report; and at intervals throughout the tautboreal night you could hear a hollow rumbling running down the lengthof 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 thethermometer until at eight o'clock on the fourth day it stood justabove zero. Cold? It was splendid weather! with four inches of ice onthe little pond behind the ridge, glare ice, black as you looked acrossit, but like a pane of plate glass as you peered into it at thestirless bottom below; smooth glare ice untouched by the wing of thewind or by even the circling runner of the skater-snow. Another dayand 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. Iwent on out beneath the stars. It may have been the tightenedtelephone wires overhead, or the frozen ground beneath me ringing withthe distant tread of the coming north wind, yet over these, and withthem, I heard the singing of a voiceless song, no louder than thewinging hum of bees, but vaster--the earth and air responding to astarry lyre as some Aeolian harper, sweeping through the silvery spacesof the night, brushed the strings with her robes of jeweled cold. 

The mercury stood at zero by one o'clock. A biting wind had risen andblew all the next day. Eight inches of ice by this time. One nightmore 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 ofthe marvelous day all mine. Like apples of gold in baskets of silverwere the snow-covered ridges in the light of the slow-coming dawn. Thewind had fallen, but the chill seemed the more intense, so silently ittook hold. My breath hung about me in little gray clouds, covering myface, and even my coat, with rime. As the hurt passed from my fingers, my eyebrows seemed to become detached, my cheeks shrunk, my fleshsuddenly free of cumbering clothes. But in half a minute the rapid redblood would come beating back, spreading over me and out from me, withthe pain, and then the glow, of life, of perfect life that seemeditself to feed upon the consuming cold. 

No other living thing was yet abroad, no stir or sound except thetinkling of tiny bells all about me that were set to swinging as Imoved along. The crusted snow was strewn with them; every twig washung, and every pearl-bent grass blade. Then off through the woodsrang the chime of louder bells, sleigh bells; then the shrill squeal ofiron runners over dry snow; then the broken voices of men; and soonthrough 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 awhirling storm, the grip of the cold relaxed, the woods abloom with theclinging snow. But the crop was nearly in. High and higher rose thecold blue cakes within the ice-house doors until they touched therafter plate. 

It was hard work. The horses pulled hard; the men swore hard, now andagain, and worked harder than they swore. They were rough, simple men, crude and elemental like their labor. It was elemental work--filling ahouse with ice, three hundred-pound cakes of clean, clear ice, cut fromthe pond, skidded into the pungs, and hauled through the woods allwhite, and under a sky all gray, with softly-falling snow. They earnedtheir penny; and I earned my penny, and I got it, though I asked onlythe wages of going on from dawn to dark, down the crystal hours of theday. 

[Illustration: Seed catalogues]

IV

SEED CATALOGUES

"The new number of the 'Atlantic' came to-day, " She said, stopping bythe 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 inquired, laying down thenew magazine. 

"A seed catalogue. "

"More seed catalogues! Why, you read nothing else last night. "

"But this is a new one, " I replied, "and I declare I never saw turnipsthat could touch this improved strain here. I am going to plant a lotof 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 firstpeas in by the last of March. You see peas"--she was backingaway--"this new Antarctic Pea--will stand a lot of cold; but beans--docome here, and look at these Improved Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans!"holding out the wonderfully lithographed page toward her. But shebacked still farther away, and, putting her hands behind her, looked atme instead, and very solemnly. 

I suppose every man comes to know that unaccountable expression in hiswife's eyes soon or late: a sad, baffled expression, detached, remote, as of things seen darkly, or descried afar off; an expression whichleaves you feeling that you are afar off, --discernible, but infinitelydwindled. Two minds with but a single thought--so you start; but soonshe finds, or late, that as the heavens are high above the earth, soare some of your thoughts above her thoughts. She cannot follow. Onthe brink she stands and sees you, through the starry spaces, driftfrom her ken in your fleet of--seed catalogues. 

I have never been able to explain to her the seed catalogue. She is asfond of vegetables as I, and neither of us cares much for turnips--norfor carrots, nor parsnips either, when it comes to that, our two heartsat the table beating happily as one. Born in the country, sheinherited a love of the garden, but a feminine garden, the garden_parvus, minor, minimus_--so many cut-worms long, so many cut-wormswide. I love a garden of size, a garden that one cut-worm cannot sweepdown upon in the night. 

For years I have wanted to be a farmer, but there in the furrow aheadof me, like a bird on its nest, she has sat with her knitting; and whenI 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 beetseeds for a meal; so many meals for a row, with never two rows ofanything, with hardly a full-length row of anything, and with all therows of different lengths, as if gardening were a sort of geometry or aproblem in arithmetic, figuring your vegetable with the meal for acommon divisor--how many times it will go into all your rows withoutleaving a remainder!

Now I go by the seed catalogue, planting, not after the dish, as if myonly 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 ofso 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 youcannot sow seeds as you can sew buttons; that the seed-man has nomachine for putting sure-sprout-humps into each of his minute wares asthe hook-and-eye-man has; that with all wisdom and understanding onecould do no better than to buy (as I am careful to do) out of thatcatalogue whose title reads "Honest Seeds"; and that even the Sower inHoly Writ allowed somewhat for stony places and other inherent hazardsof planting time. 

But she follows only afar off, affirming the primary meaning of thatparable to be plainly set forth in the context, while the secondarymeaning pointeth out the folly of sowing seed anywhere save on goodground--which seemed to be only about one quarter of the area in theparable that was planted; and that anyhow, seed catalogues, especiallythose in colors, designed as they are to catch the simple-minded andunwary, need to be looked into by the post-office authorities and ifpossible kept from all city people, and from college professors inparticular. 

She is entirely right about the college professors. Her understandingis based upon years of observation and the patient cooking of uncountedpots of beans. 

I confess to a weakness for gardening and no sense at all of proportionin vegetables. I can no more resist a seed catalogue than a toper canhis cup. There is no game, no form of exercise, to compare for amoment in my mind with having a row of young growing things in a patchof mellow soil; no possession so sure, so worth while, so interestingas 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 themuscles strong enough either, when there is hoeing to do. 

Why should she not take it as a solemn duty to save me from the hoe?Man is an immoderate animal, especially in the spring when the doors ofhis classroom are about to open for him into the wide and greeningfields. There is only one place to live, --here in the hills ofHingham; and there is nothing better to do here or anywhere, than thehoeing, or the milking, or the feeding of the hens. 

A professor in the small college of Slimsalaryville tells in a recentmagazine of his long hair and no dress suit, and of his wife's doingthe washing in order that they might have bread and the "EugenicReview" on a salary of twelve hundred dollars a year. It is a sadstory, in the midst of which he exclaims: "I may even get to the placewhere I can _spare time_ (italics mine) to keep chickens or a cow, andthat would help immensely; but I am so constituted that chickens or acow would certainly cripple my work. " How cripple it? Is n't it hiswork to _teach_? Far from it. "Let there be light, " he says at theend of the essay, is his work, and he adds that he has been so busywith it that he is on the verge of a nervous break-down. Of course heis. Who would n't be with that job? And of course he has n't aconstitution for chickens and a cow. But neither does he seem to haveconstitution enough for the light-giving either, being ready tocollapse from his continuous shining. 

But isn't this the case with many of us? Aren't we overworking--doingour own simple job of teaching and, besides that, taking upon ourselvesthe Lord's work of letting there be light?

I have come to the conclusion that there might not be any less lightwere the Lord allowed to do his own shining, and that probably theremight be quite as good teaching if the teacher stuck humbly to hisdesk, and after school kept chickens and a cow. The egg-money andcream "would help immensely, " even the Professor admits, theProfessor's wife fully concurring no doubt. 

Don't we all take ourselves a little seriously--we college professorsand 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 Ihave learned that I can go forth unto my work and to my labor until theevening, quitting then, and getting home in time to feed the chickensand milk the cow. I am a professional man, and I dwell in the midst ofprofessional men, all of whom are inclined to help the Lord out byworking after dark--all of whom are really in dire constitutional needof the early roosting chickens and the quiet, ruminating cow. 

To walk humbly with the hens, that's the thing--after the classes aredismissed and the office closed. To get out of the city, away frombooks, and theories, and students, and patients, and clients, andcustomers--back to real things, simple, restful, healthful things forbody and soul, homely domestic things that lay eggs at 70 cents perdozen, and make butter at $2. 25 the 5-pound box! As for me, this does"help immensely, " affording me all necessary hair-cuts (I don't wantthe "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 (chickensand a cow) will prevent his work from crippling him--keeping him alittle from his students and thus saving him from too much teaching;keeping him from reading the "Eugenic Review" and thus saving him fromtoo much learning; curing him, in short, of his "constitution" that isbound to come to some sort of a collapse unless rested and saved bychickens and a cow. 

"By not too many chickens, " she would add; and there is no one to matchher with a chicken--fried, stewed, or turned into pie. 

The hens are no longer mine, the boys having taken them over; but thegardening I can't give up, nor the seed catalogues. 

The one in my hands was exceptionally radiant, and exceptionally fullof Novelties and Specialties for the New Year, among them being anextraordinary new pole bean--an Improved Kentucky Wonder. She hadbacked away, as I have said, and instead of looking at the page ofbeans, looked solemnly at me; then with something sorrowful, somethingsomewhat Sunday-like in her voice, an echo, I presume, of lessons inthe 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?"

"I--don't--re--"

"Three--just three, " she answered. "And I think you must remember howmany of that row of poles we picked?"

"Why, yes, I--"

"Three--just three out of thirty poles! Now, do you think you rememberhow 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 beanswhen 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 peculiarly hard as theend of a series, and on a topic as difficult as beans. I don't knowbeans. There is little or nothing about beans in the history ofphilosophy or in poetry. Thoreau says that when he was hoeing hisbeans it was not beans that he hoed nor he that hoed beans--which wasthe only saying that came to mind at the moment, and under thecircumstances 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, Ireally don't know--that _I_ exactly understand. _Everything_ is fullof things that even I can't understand--how to explain my tendency toplant all kinds of beans, for instance; or my 'weakness, ' as you callit, 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 yourSwampatalk Club; you don't intend to forego that famous roast beef forthe seed catalogues?"

"I did n't intend to, but I must say that literature like this isenough to make a man a vegetarian. Look at that page for anold-fashioned New England Boiled Dinner! Such carrots. Really _they_look good enough to eat. I think I 'll plant some of those improvedcarrots; and some of these parsnips; and some--"

"You had better go get ready, " she said, "and please put that big stickon the fire for me, " drawing the lamp toward her, as she spoke, so thatall of its green-shaded light fell over her--over the silver in herhair, with its red rose; over the pink and lacy thing that wrapped herfrom her sweet throat to the silver stars on her slippers. 

"I'm not going to that Club!" I said. "I have talked myself for threehours to-day, attended two conferences, and listened to one address. There were three different societies for the general improving ofthings that met at the University halls to-day with big speakers fromthe ends of the earth. To-morrow night I address The First CenturyClub in the city after a dinner with the New England Teachers ofEnglish Monthly Luncheon Club--and I would like to know what we cameout here in the woods for, anyhow?"

"If you are going--" She was speaking calmly. 

"Going where?" I replied, picking up the seed catalogues to make roomfor myself on the couch. "_Please_ look at this pumpkin! Think ofwhat a jack-o'-lantern it would make for the boys! I am going toplant--"

"You 'll be cold, " she said, rising and drawing a steamer rug up overme; then laying the open magazine across my shoulders while giving thepillow a motherly pull, she added, with a sigh of contentment:--

"Perhaps, if it had n't been for me, you might have been a greatsuccess with pumpkins or pigs--I don't know. "

[Illustration: The Dustless-Duster]

V

THE DUSTLESS-DUSTER

There are beaters, brooms and Bissell'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 thecloset, the whole dust-raising kit is incomplete without theDustless-Duster. 

For the Dustless-Duster is final, absolute. What can be added to, ortaken away from, a Dustless-Duster? A broom is only a broom, even anew broom. Its sphere is limited; its work is partial. Dampened andheld persistently down by the most expert of sweepers, the broom stillleaves something for the Dustless-Duster to do. But theDustless-Duster leaves nothing for anything to do. The dusting is done. 

Because there are many who dust, and because they have searched in vainfor a dustless-duster, I should like to say that the Dustless-Dustercan be bought at department stores, at those that have a full line ofdepartments--at any department store, in fact; for the Dustless-Dusterdepartment 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 sellor preach or teach, and you shall have it--the perfect thing which youhave 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 often brought it home, for my search has beendiligent since a certain day, years ago, --a "Commencement Day" at theInstitute. 

I had never attended a Commencement exercise before; I had never beenin an opera house before; and the painted light through the roof ofwindows high overhead, the strains of the orchestra from far below me, the banks of broad-leaved palms, the colors, the odors, the confusionof flowers and white frocks, were strangely thrilling. Nothing hadever happened to me in the woods like this: the exaltation, thedepression, the thrill of joy, the throb of pain, the awakening, thewonder, the purpose, and the longing! It was all a dream--all but theform 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 sentiments she uttered; I onlyremember 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 simplewhite 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 was fourteen! Now I am past forty; and uponthe kitchen clothes-dryer hangs the Dustless-Duster. 

No, I have not lost the vision. The daughter of that girl, the imageof her mother, slipped into my classroom the other day. Nor have Ifaltered in the quest. The search goes on, and must go on; for howeveroften 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 thatit is only a piece of cheesecloth, ordinary cheesecloth, dyed black andstamped with red letters? The search must go on, notwithstanding theclutter in the kitchen closet. The cellar is crowded withDustless-Dusters, too; the garret is stuffed with them. There islittle else besides them anywhere in the house. And this was an emptyhouse when I moved into it, a few years ago. 

As I moved in, an old man moved out, back to the city whence a fewyears before he had come; and he took back with him twelve two-horsewagon-loads of Dustless-Dusters. He had spent a long life collectingthem, and now, having gathered all there were in the country, he wasgoing back to the city, in a last pathetic, a last heroic, effort tofind the one Dustless-Duster more. 

It was the old man's twelve two-horse loads that were pathetic. Therewere many sorts of things in those twelve loads, of many lands, of manydates, but all of one stamp. The mark was sometimes hard to find, corroded sometimes nearly past deciphering, yet never quite gone. Thered letters were indelible on every piece, from the gross of antiquecandle-moulds (against the kerosene's giving out) to an ancientcoffin-plate, far oxidized, and engraved "Jones, " which, the old mansaid, as he pried it off the side of the barn, "might come in handy anyday. "

The old man has since died and been laid to rest. Upon his coffin wasset 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 shallattempt to carry out, or try to find as soon as we are out, aDustless-Duster. For we did bring something with us into this world, losing it temporarily, to be forever losing and finding it; and when wego 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 certainof carrying nothing out of this world, but we are certain of leavingmany things behind. 

Among those that I shall leave behind me is The Perfect AutomaticCarpet-Layer. But I did not buy that. She did. It was one of thefirst of our perfections. 

We have more now. I knew as I entered the house that night thatsomething had happened; that the hope of the early dawn had died, forsome cause, with the dusk. The trouble showed in her eyes: mingleddoubt, chagrin, self-accusation, self-defense, defeat--familiarsymptoms. 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 theman who sold me "The Magic Stropless Razor Salve. " No, not that man!I shall never meet him again, for vengeance 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; butit is for no man or woman to buy one. 

She had seen a vision, and had bought it--"The Perfect AutomaticCarpet-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 Parsonage Committee brought thenew carpet this afternoon, and I have started to put it down. Ithought we would finish it this evening. It won't be any work at allfor you, for I--I--bought you one of these to-day to put it downwith, "--pushing an illustrated circular across the table toward me. 

ANY CHILD CAN USE IT

THE PERFECT AUTOMATIC CARPET-LAYER

No more carpet-laying bills. Do your own laying. No wrinkles. Nocrowded corners. No sore knees. No pounded fingers. No broken backs. Stand up and lay your carpet with the Perfect Automatic. Easy assweeping. 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, partgun, part rake, part catapult, part curry-comb, fit apparently foralmost any purpose, from the business of blunderbuss to the office ofan apple-picker. Its handle, which any child could hold, was somewhatshorter and thicker than a hoe-handle, and had a slotted tin barrel, asort of intestine, on its ventral side along its entire length. Downthis intestine, their points sticking through the slot, moved the tacksin single file to a spring-hammer close to the floor. This hammer wasoperated by a lever or tongue at the head of the handle, the connectionbetween the hammer at the distal end and the lever at the proximal endbeing effected by means of a steel-wire spinal cord down the dorsalside of the handle. Over the fist of a hammer spread a jaw of sharpteeth to take hold of the carpet. The thing could not talk; but itcould do almost anything else, so fearfully and wonderfully was it made. 

As for laying carpets with it, any child could do that. But we did n'thave any children then, and I had quite outgrown my childhood. I triedto be a boy again just for that night. I grasped the handle of thePerfect Automatic, stretched with our united strength, and pushed downon the lever. The spring-hammer drew back, a little trap or mouth atthe end of the slotted tin barrel opened for the tack, the tack jumpedout, turned over, landed point downward upon the right spot in thecarpet, the crouching hammer sprang, and--

And then I lifted up the Perfect Automatic to see if the tack wentin, --a simple act that any child could do, but which took automaticallyand perfectly all the stretch out of the carpet; for the hammer did nothit the tack; the tack really did not get through the trap; the trapdid not open the slot; the slot--but no matter. We have no carpetsnow. The Perfect Automatic stands in the garret with all its originalvarnish on. At its feet sits a half-used can of "Beesene, The Princeof Floor Pastes. "

We have only hard-wood floors now, which we treated, upon the strengthof the label, with this Prince of Pastes, "Beesene"--"guaranteed not toshow wear or dirt or to grow gritty; water-proof, gravel-proof. No rugwill ruck on it, no slipper stick to it. Needs no weighted brush. Self-shining. The only perfect Floor Wax known. One box will do allthe floors you have. "

Indeed, half a box did all the floors we have. No slipper would stickto the paste, but the paste would stick to the slipper; and the greasyPrince did in spots all the floors we have: the laundry floor, theattic floor, and the very boards of the vegetable cellar. 

I am young yet. I have not had time to collect my twelve two-horseloads. But I am getting them fast. 

Only the other day a tall lean man came to the side door, asking aftermy four boys by name, and inquiring when my new book would be off thestocks, and, incidentally, showing me a patent-applied-for devicecalled "The Fat Man's Friend. "

"The Friend" was a steel-wire hoop, shaped and jointed like a pair ofcalipers, but knobbed at its points with little metal balls. Theinstrument 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, spreadsecurely over the Fat Man's bosom. 

"Ideal thing, now, is n't it?" said the agent, demonstrating with hishandkerchief. 

"Why--yes"--I hesitated--"for a fat man, perhaps. "

"Just so, " he replied, running me over rapidly with a professional eye;"but you know, Professor, that when a man's forty, or thereabouts, it'sthe nature of him to stouten. Once past forty he's liable to pick upany day. And when he starts, you know as well as I, Professor, when hestarts there's nothing fattens faster than a man of forty. You oughtto have one of these 'Friends' on hand. "

"But fat does n't run in my family, " I protested, my helpless, single-handed condition being plainly manifest in my tone. 

"No matter, " he rejoined, "look at me! Six feet three, and thin as alath. I 'm what you might call a walking skeleton, ready to disjoint, as the poet says, and eat all my meals in fear, which I would do if 'twa'n't for this little 'Friend. ' I can't eat without it. I miss itmore when I am eatin' than I miss the victuals. I carry one with meall the time. Awful handy little thing. Now--"

"But--" I put in. 

"Certainly, " he continued, with the smoothest-running motor I everheard, "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 oftying a knot in the corner of your napkin and anchoring it under yourAdam's apple--_that's_ gone by. Also the stringed bib and safety-pin. Both those devices were crude--but necessary, of course, Professor--andinconvenient, and that old-fashioned knot really dangerous; for theknot, pressing against the Adam's apple, or the apple, as you mightsay, trying to swallow the knot--well, if there isn't less apoplexy andstrangulation when this little Friend finds universal application, thenI 'm no Prophet, as the Good Book says. "

"But you see--" I broke in. 

"I do, Professor. It's right here. I understand your objection. Butit is purely verbal and academic, Professor. You are troubledconcerning the name of this indispensable article. But you know, aswell as I--even better with your education, Professor--that there 'snothing, absolutely nothing in a name. 'What's in a name?' the poetsays. And I 'll agree with you--though, of course, it'sconfidential--that 'The Fat Man's Friend' is, as you literary folkswould say, more or less of a _nom de plume_. Isn't it? Besides, --ifyou 'll 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 couldn't tell them apart. You might just as well have one of these, and runno chances getting one of the next lot. They'll be precisely the same;only, you see, they're going to name the next ones 'Every Bosom'sFriend, ' to fit lean and fat, and without distinction of sex. Idealthing now, is n't it? Yes, that's right--fifteen cents--two fortwenty-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, andI 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 thanhe 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 havecollected, count against the conviction that at last I have it--theperfect thing--until I _reach_ home. But with several of myperfections I have never yet reached home, or I am waiting an opportuneseason to give them to my wife. I have been disappointed; but let noone try to tell me that there is no such thing as Perfection. Is notthe desire for it the breath of my being? Is not the search for it theend of my existence? Is not the belief that at last I possess it--inmyself, my children, my breed of hens, my religious creed, my politicalparty--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 otherpolitical parties. During a political campaign, not long since, Iwrote to a friend in New Jersey, --

"Now, whatever your particular, personal brand of political faith, itis clearly your moral duty to vote this time the Democratic ticket. "

Whereupon (and he is a thoughtful, God-fearing man, too) he wroteback, --

"As I belong to the only party of real reform, I shall stick to it thisyear, 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 possessionof it?

There is only one thing deeper in the heart of man than his desire forcompleteness, and that is his conviction of being about to attain untoit. 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--momentarily--every time hefinds himself. The desire for it is the sweet spring of all hissatisfactions; the possession of it the bitter fountain of many of hiswoes. 

Apply the conviction anywhere, to anything--creeds, wives, hens--andsee how it works out. 

As to _hens_:--

There are many breeds of fairly good hens, and I have tried as manybreeds as I have had years of keeping hens, but not until the poultryshow, last winter, did I come upon the perfect hen. I had been workingtoward her through the Bantams, Brahmas, and Leghorns, to the PlymouthRocks. I had tried the White and the Barred Plymouth Rocks, but theywere not the hen. Last winter I came upon the originator of the BuffPlymouth Rocks--and here she was! I shall breed nothing henceforth butBuff Plymouth Rocks. 

In the Buff Rock we have a bird of ideal size, neither too large nortoo small, weighing about three pounds more than the undersizedLeghorn, and about three pounds less than the oversized Brahma; we havea bird of ideal color, too--a single, soft, even tone, and no suchbarnyard daub as the Rhode Island Red; not crow-colored, either, likethe Minorca; nor liable to all the dirt of the White Plymouth Rocks. Being a beautiful and uniform buff, this perfect Plymouth Rock iseasily bred true to color, as the vari-colored fowls are not. 

Moreover, the Buff Rock is a layer, is _the_ layer, maturing as shedoes about four weeks later than the Rhode Island Reds, and so escapingthat fatal early fall laying with its attendant moult and egglessinterim until March! On the other hand, the Buff Rock matures about amonth earlier than the logy, slow-growing breeds, and so gets a goodstart before the cold and eggless weather comes. 

And such an egg! There are white eggs and brown eggs, large and smalleggs, but only one ideal egg--the Buff Rock's. It is of a soft lovelybrown, yet whitish enough for a New York market, but brown enough, however, to meet the exquisite taste of the Boston trade. In fact itis neither white nor brown, but rather a delicate blend of the two--anew 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 avery late start last spring. But the real question, speakingprofessionally, with any breed of fowls is a market question: How dothey dress? How do they eat?

If the Buff Plymouth Rock is an ideal bird in her feathers, she is evenmore so plucked. All white-feathered fowl, in spite of yellow legs, look cadaverous when picked. All dark-feathered fowl, with theirtendency to green legs and black pin-feathers, look spotted, long dead, and unsavory. But the Buff Rock, a melody in color, shows thatconsonance, that consentaneousness, of flesh to feather that makes theplucked fowl to the feathered fowl what high noon is to the faint andfar-off dawn--a glow of golden legs and golden neck, mellow, melting asbutter, and all the more so with every unpicked pinfeather. 

Can there be any doubt of the existence of hen-perfection? Anyquestion of my having attained unto it--with the maturing of this newbreed of hens?

For all spiritual purposes, that is, for all satisfactions, the idealhen is the pullet--the Buff Plymouth Rock pullet. 

Just so the ideal wife. If we could only keep them pullets!

The trouble we husbands have with our wives begins with our marryingthem. There is seldom any trouble with them before. Our belief infeminine perfection is as profound and as eternal as youth. And theperfection is just as real as the faith. Youth is always bringing thebride home--to hang her on the kitchen clothes-dryer. She turns out tobe ordinary cheese-cloth, dyed a more or less fast black--thisperfection that he had stamped in letters of indelible red!

The race learns nothing. I learn, but not my children after me. Theylearn only after themselves. Already I hear my boys saying that theirwives--! And the oldest of these boys has just turned fourteen!

Fourteen! the trouble all began at fourteen. No, the trouble beganwith Adam, though Eve has been responsible for much of it since. Adamhad all that a man should have wanted in his perfect Garden. Nevertheless he wanted Eve. Eve in turn had Adam, a perfect man! butshe wanted something more--if only the apple tree in the middle of theGarden. And we all of us were there in that Garden--with Adam thinkinghe was getting perfection in Eve; with Eve incapable of appreciatingperfection 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 fisherman. 

"Go home, and you shall find her with the ballot, " sighs the flounder. "But has n't she Dustless-Dusters enough already?"

It would seem so. But once having got Adam, who can blame her forwanting 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 perfect man! Don't forbid her, for she will have itanyhow. It may not turn out to be all that she thinks it is. But didyou turn out to be all that she thought you were? She will have a biteof this new apple if she has to disobey, and die for it, because suchdisobedience and death are in answer to a higher command, and to alarger 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 animalsin the Garden, placing us even above the angels, --so far above, as tobring 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 ofAdam; in her clear understanding of his lame logic, --that her_im_perfections added to his perfections make the perfect Perfection;and in her reaching out beyond Adam for something more--for the ballotnow. 

If there is growth, if there is hope, if there is continuance, if thereis immortality for the race and for the soul, it is to be found in thissure faith in the Ultimate, the Perfect, in this certain disappointmentevery time we think we have it; and in this abiding conviction that weare about to bring it home. But let a man settle down on perfection asa present possession, and that man is as good as dead already--evenreligiously dead, if he has possession of a perfect Salvation. 

Now, "Sister Smith" claimed to possess Perfection--a perfect infalliblebook of revelations in her King James Version of the Scriptures, andshe claimed to have lived by it, too, for eighty years. I was freshfrom the theological school, and this was my first "charge. " This wasmy first meal, too, in this new charge, at the home of one of theofficial brethren, with whom Sister Smith lived. 

There was an ominous silence at the table for which I could hardlyaccount--unless it had to do with the one empty chair. Then SisterSmith appeared and took the chair. The silence deepened. Then SisterSmith began to speak and everybody stopped eating. Brother Jones laiddown his knife, Sister Jones dropped her hands into her lap until thething should be over. Leaning far forward toward me across the table, her steady gray eyes boring through me, her long bony finger pointingbeyond me into eternity, Sister Smith began with spaced and measuredwords:--

"My young Brother--what--do--you--think--of--Jonah?"

I reached for a doughnut, broke it, slowly, dipped it up and down inthe cup of mustard and tried for time. Not a soul stirred. Not a wordor 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 needn't tell me what youthink of Jonah. You--are--too--young--to--know--what--you--think--of--Jonah. But Iwill tell you what _I_ think of Jonah: if the Scriptures had said thatJonah swallowed the whale, it would be just as easy to believe as it isthat 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 genuineinspired Authorized Version, word for word, just as God spoke it!"

Sister Smith has gone to Heaven, but in spite of her theology. Dearold 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 perfect Creed, nor a perfectSalvation. She did not need them; nor could she have used them; forthey would have posited a divine command to be perfect--a too difficultaccomplishment for any of us, even for Sister Smith. 

There is no such divine command laid upon us; but only such a divinelyhuman need springing up within us, and reaching out for everything, inits deep desire, from dust-cloths dyed black to creeds of every color. 

This is a life of imperfections, a world made of cheese-cloth, merelydyed black, and stamped in red letters--The Dustless-Duster. Yet acheese-cloth world so dyed and stamped is better than a cloth-of-goldworld, for the cloth-of-gold you would not want to dye nor to stampwith burning letters. 

We have never found it, --this perfect thing, --and perhaps we nevershall. But the desire, the search, the faith, must not fail us, as attimes they seem to do. At times the very tides of the ocean seem tofail, --when the currents cease to run. Yet when they are at slackhere, they are at flood on the other side of the world, turning alreadyto pour back--

 ". . . Lo, out of his plenty the sea Pours fast; full soon the time of the flood-tide shall be--"

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 nonearer it now than when I started, yet the search has carried me farfrom that start. And if I never arrive, then, at least, I shall keepgoing on, which, in itself maybe the thing--the Perfect Thing that I amseeking. 

[Illustration: Spring ploughing]

VI

SPRING PLOUGHING

 "See-Saw, Margery Daw! Sold her bed and lay upon straw"

--the very worst thing, I used to think, that ever happened in MotherGoose. I might steal a pig, perhaps, like Tom the Piper's Son, butnever would I do such a thing as Margery did; the dreadful picture ofher nose and of that bottle in her hand made me sure of that. Andyet--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 simpletask to heal me of my grievous wound!

Speed, distance, change--are these the cure for that old hurt we callliving, the long dull ache of winter, the throbbing bitter-sweet painof spring? We seek for something different, something not differentbut faster and still faster, to fill our eyes with flying, our earswith rushing, our skins with scurrying, our diaphragms, which are oursouls, with the thrill of curves, and straight stretches, of lifts, anddrops, 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--anyway, but round and round, andslowly--as if one could speed away from being, or ever travel beyondone's self! How pathetic to sell all that one has and buy anautomobile! to shift one's grip from the handles of life to the wheelof change! to forsake the furrow for the highway, the rooted soil forthe flying dust, the here for the there; imagining that somehow a caris more than a plough, that going is the last word inliving--demountable rims and non-skid tires, the great gift of the GodMechanic, being the 1916 model of the wings of the soul!

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. Ihave tried many substitutes for ploughing; and as for the automobile, Ihave driven that thousands of miles, driven it almost daily, summer andwinter; but let the blackbirds return, let the chickweed start in thegarden, then the very stones of the walls cry out--"Plough! plough!"

It is not the stones I hear, but the entombed voices of earlierprimitive selves far back in my dim past; those, and the call of theboy I was yesterday, whose landside toes still turn in, perhaps, fromwalking 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 thecall--

 "Zephirus eek, with his sweetë breeth"--

and many hearing it long to "goon on pilgrimages, " or to the Mainewoods to fish, or, waiting until the 19th, to leave Boston by boat andgo up and down the shore to see how fared their summer cottages duringthe winter storms; some even imagine they have malaria and long forbitters--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

 "ferne halwes couth in sondry landës"

that I long for: but simply for the soil, for the warming, stirringearth, for my mother. It is back to her breast I would go, back to thewide sweet fields, to the slow-moving team and the lines about myshoulder, to the even furrow rolling from the mould-board, to the tasteof the soil, the sight of the sky, the sound of the robins andbluebirds and blackbirds, and the ringing notes of Highhole over thesunny fields. 

I hold the plough as my only hold upon the earth, and as I followthrough the fresh and fragrant furrow I am planted with every footstep, growing, budding, blooming into a spirit of the spring. I can catchthe blackbirds ploughing, I can turn under with my furrow the laughterof the flowers, the very joy of the skies. But if I so much as turn inmy tracks, the blackbirds scatter; if I shout, Highhole is silent; if Ichase the breeze, it runs away; I might climb into the humming maples, might fill my hands with arbutus and bloodroot, might run and laughaloud with the light; as if with feet I could overtake it, could catchit 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 thefurrow; and I can be the spring. 

I could plough, I mean, when I had a plough. But I sold it for fivedollars and bought a second-hand automobile for fifteen hundred--aseverybody else has. So now I do as everybody else does, --borrow myneighbor's plough, or still worse, get my neighbor to do my ploughing, being still blessed with a neighbor so steadfast and simple as topossess a plough. But I must plough or my children's children willnever live to have children, --they will have motor cars instead. Theman who pulls down his barns and builds a garage is not planning forposterity. But perhaps it does not matter; for while we are purringcityward over the sleek and tarry roads, big hairy Finns are followingthe plough round and round our ancestral fields, planting children inthe furrows, so that there shall be some one here when we have motoredoff to possess the land. 

I see no way but to keep the automobile and buy another plough, not formy children's sake any more than for my own. There was an old manliving in this house when I bought it who moved back into the city andtook with him, among other things, a big grindstone and twolong-handled hayforks--for crutches, did he think? and to keep acutting 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 asylumsand hospitals, I shall carry into the city with me a plough; and Ishall pray the police to let me go every springtime to the Garden orthe Common and there turn a few furrows as one whom still his mothercomforteth. 

It is only a few furrows that I now turn. A half-day and it is allover, all the land ploughed that I own, --all that the Lord intendedshould be tilled. A half-day--but every fallow field and patch ofstubble within me has been turned up in that time, given over for therain and sunshine to mellow and put into tender tilth. 

No other labor, no other contact with the earth is like ploughing. Youmay play upon it, travel over it, delve into it, build your house downon it; but when you strike into the bosom of the fields with yourploughshare, wounding and healing as your feet follow deep in the longfresh cut, you feel the throbbing of the heart of life through theoaken handles as you never felt it before; you are conscious of acloser union, --dust with dust, --of a more mystical union, --spirit withspirit, --than any other approach, work, or rite, or ceremony, can giveyou. You move, but your feet seem to reach through and beyond thefurrow like the roots of the oak tree; sun and air and soil are yoursas if the blood in your veins were the flow of all sweet saps, oak andmaple and willow, and your breath their bloom of green and garnet andgold. 

And so, until I get a new plough and a horse to pull it, I shall hiremy neighbor--hire him to drive the horses, while I hold in the plough!This is what I have come to! _Hiring_ another to skim my cream andshare it! Let me handle both team and plough, a plough that guidesitself, and a deep rich piece of bottom land, and a furrow, --a longstraight furrow that curls and crests like a narrow wave and breaksevenly into the trough of the wave before. 

But even with the hired plough, I am taking part in the making ofspring; and more: I am planting me again as a tree, a bush, a mat ofchickweed, --lowly, tiny, starry-flowered chickweed, --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 iswalking not by sight. A man believes, trusts, worships something hecannot see when he ploughs. It is an act of faith. In all time menhave known and _feared_ God; but there must have been a new and higherconsciousness when they began to plough. They hunted and feared Godand remained savage; they ploughed, trusted, and loved God--and becamecivilized. 

Nothing more primitive than the plough have we brought with us out ofour civilized past. In 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 theLord's appointed close; then homeward plod your weary way, leaving theworld 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 poethandled more of life than you? Has he ever gone deeper than the bottomof your furrow, or asked any larger faith than you of your field? Hashe ever found anything sweeter or more satisfying than the wholesometoilsome round of the plough?

[Illustration: Mere beans]

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. 

"A 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'sgoing to get. "

"Just so, " he answered, his eye a-glitter with wrath as it traveled thetrail of the fox across the dooryard; "just so, and I 'll go halveswith the soil; but I never signed a lease to run this farm on shareswith the varmints. "

"Well, " said I, "I 've come out from the city to run my farm on shareswith the whole universe--fox and hawk, dry weather and wet, summer andwinter. I believe there is a great deal more to farming than merebeans. I 'm going to raise birds and beasts as well. I 'm going tocultivate everything, from my stone-piles up to the stars. "

He looked me over. I had not been long out from the city. Then hesaid, thinking doubtless of my stone-piles:--

"Professor, you 've bought a mighty rich piece of land. And it's justas you say; there's more to farmin' than beans. But, as I see it, beans are beans anyway you cook 'em; and I think, if I was you, I wouldhang on a while yet to my talkin' job in the city. "

It was sound advice. I have a rich farm. I have raised beans thatwere beans, and I have raised birds, besides, and beasts, --a perfectlyenormous crop of woodchucks; I have cultivated everything up to thestars; but I find it necessary to hang on a while yet to my talkin' jobin the city. 

Nevertheless, Joel is fundamentally wrong about the beans, for beansare not necessarily beans any way you cook them, nor are beans merebeans any way you grow them--not if I remember Thoreau and my extensiveministerial experience with bean suppers. 

As for growing mere beans--listen to Thoreau. He is out in his patchat Walden. 

"When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woodsand the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded aninstant and immeasurable crop. It was no longer beans that I hoed, norI that hoed beans. "

Who was it, do you suppose, that hoed? And, if not beans, what was itthat he hoed? Well, poems for one thing, prose poems. If there is amore delightful chapter in American literature than that one in Waldenon the bean-patch, I don't know which chapter it is. That patch wasmade to yield more than beans. The very stones were made to tinkletill their music sounded on the sky. 

"As _I_ see it, beans are beans, " said Joel. And so they are, as hesees them. 

Is not the commonplaceness, the humdrumness, the dead-levelness, oflife largely a matter of individual vision, "as I see it"?

Take farm life, for instance, and how it is typified in my neighbor!how it is epitomized, too, and really explained in his "beans arebeans"! He raises beans; she cooks beans; they eat beans. Life ispretty much all beans. If "beans are beans, " why, how much more islife?

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 thesoil gives back, thirty, sixty, an hundredfold. What if he should giveto the skies as well?--to the wild life that dwells with him on hisland?--to the wild flowers that bank his meadow brook?--to the treesthat cover his pasture slopes? Would they, like the soil, giveanything back?

Off against the sky to the south a succession of his rounded slopesshoulder their way from the woods out to where the road and the brookwind through. They cannot be tilled; the soil is too scant andgravelly; but they are lovely in their gentle forms, and still lovelierin their clumps of mingled cedars and gray birches, scattered dark andsharply pointed on the blue of the sky, and diffuse, and soft, andgleaming white against the hillside's green. I cannot help seeing themfrom my windows, cannot help lingering over them--could not, rather;for recently my neighbor (and there never was a better neighbor) sent aman over those hills with an axe, and piled the birches into cords ofsnowy firewood. 

It was done. I could not help it, but in my grief I went over andspoke to him about it. He was sorry, and explained the case bysaying, --

"Well, if there's one kind of tree I hate more than another, it's agray birch. "

We certainly need a rural uplift. We need an urban uplift, too, nodoubt, for I suppose "beans are beans" in Boston, just as they are herein Hingham. But it does seem the more astonishing that in the country, where the very environment is poetry, where companionship with livingthings is constant, where even the labor of one's hands is coöperationwith the divine forces of nature--the more astonishing, I say, thatunder these conditions life should so often be but bare existence, merebeans. 

There are many causes for this, one of them being an unwillingness toshare largely with the whole of nature. "I 'll go halves with thesoil, " said my neighbor; but he did not sign a lease to run his farm onshares with the "varmints, " the fox, which stole his fine rooster, onthis particular occasion. 

But such a contract is absolutely necessary if one is to get out offarm life--out of any life--its flowers and fragrance, as well as itspods and beans. And, first, one must be convinced, must acknowledge toone's self, that the flower and fragrance are needed in life, are asuseful as pods and beans. A row of sweet peas is as necessary on thefarm 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 roostersenough, to understand, even feel, my neighbor's wrath perfectly. Ifully sympathize with him. What, then, you ask, of my sympathy for thefox?

At times, I must admit, the strain has been very great. More than once(three times, to be exact) I have fired at that same fox to kill. Ihave lost many a rooster, but those I have not lost are many, manymore. Browned to a turn, and garnished with parsley, a rooster isalmost 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-shroudedin the early mist, his keen ears pricked, his pointed nose turnedtoward the yard where the hens were waking up. 

Something primitive, something wild and free and stirring, somethingfurtive, crafty, cunning--the shadow of the dark primeval forest, atsight of him, fell across the glaring common-placeness of that wholetame day. 

I will not ask, Was it worth the rooster? For that is too gross, toocheap a price to pay for a glimpse of wild life that set the deadnerves of the cave man in me thrilling with new life. Rather I wouldask, Are such sights and thrills worth the deliberate purpose to have awoodlot, as well as a beanpatch and a henyard, on the farm?

Our American farm life needs new and better machinery, better methods, better buildings, better roads, better schools, better stock; but givenall 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 allthe universe around, until the farmer learns not only to reap thesunshine, but also to harvest the snow; learns to get a real and richcrop out of his landscape, his shy, wild neighbors, his independenceand liberty, his various, difficult, yet strangely poetical, tasks. 

But, if farm life tends constantly to become earthy, so does businesslife, and professional life--beans, all of it. 

The farmers educated for mere efficiency, the merchants, the preachers, doctors, lawyers, educated for mere efficiency, are educated for merebeans? A great fortune, a great congregation, a great practice, agreat farm crop, are one and all mere beans? Efficiency is not a wholeeducation, nor meat a whole living, nor the worker the whole man. 

And I said as much to Joel. 

"Beans, " I said, "must be raised. Much of life must be spent hoeingthe beans. But I am going to ask myself: 'Is it _mere_ beans that I amhoeing? 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 settledon mine, and I 'll tell you what answer you 'll get to them questions. There ain't no po'try about farmin'. God did n't intend there shouldbe--as I see it. "

"Now, that is n't the way I see it at all. This is God's earth, --andthere 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. "

"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 saysHe made him farm for a livin', don't it?"

"That's what it says, " I replied. 

"Well, then, as I see it, that settles it, don't it? God puts a man ona farm when he ain't fit for anything else. 'Least, that's the way Isee it. That's how I got here, I s'pose, and I s'pose that's why Istay 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 wasnot often that I could get him so near to books as this. Let me talkbooks with Joel Moore and the talk lags. Farming and neighboring areJoel's strong points, not books. He is a general farmer and a kind ofuniversal neighbor (that being his specialty); on neighborhood and farmtopics his mind is admirably full and clear. 

"That other version is in the Bible, right along with the one you'vebeen citing--just before it in Genesis. "

He faced me squarely, a light of confidence in his eye, a ring ofcertainty, 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 inand take a look at Holy Writ on farmin', "--leading the way withalacrity into the house. 

"My father was a great Bible man down in Maine, " he went on. "Let meraise a curtain. This was his, " pointing to an immense family Bible, with hand-wrought clasps, that lay beneath the plush family album, alsoclasped, on a frail little table in the middle of the parlor floor. 

The daylight came darkly through the thick muslin draperies at thewindow and fell in a faint line across the floor. An oval frame ofhair-flowers hung on the wall opposite me--a somber wreath ofimmortelles for the departed--_of_ the departed--black, brown, auburn, and grizzled-gray, with one touch (a calla lily, I think) of thereddest hair I ever beheld. In one corner of the room stood a closedcabinet organ; behind me, a tall base-burner, polished till it seemedto light the dimmest corners of the room. There was no fire in thestove; there was no air in the room, only the mingled breath of sootand the hair-flowers and the plush album and the stuffed blue jay underthe 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 handedit to me as if we were having a funeral. 

"Read me that other account of Adam's farm, " he said; "I can't seewithout my specs. "

In spite of a certain restraint of manner and evident uneasiness at thesituation, he had something of boldness, even the condescension of thevictor toward me. He was standing and looking down at me; yet he stoodill at ease by the table. 

"Sit down, Joel, " I said, assuming an authority in his house that I sawhe 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 reverently. 

"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 mewith furtive, sidelong glances, as if he saw ghosts in the dark corners. 

"We keep this room mostly for funerals, " he volunteered, in order tostir up talk and lay what of the silence and the ghosts he could. 

"I 'll read your story of Adam's farming first, " I said, and began:"These are the generations of the heavens and of the earth"--going onwith the account of the dry, rainless world, and with no man to tillthe soil; then to the forming of Adam out of the dust, and the plantingof Eden; of the rivers, of God's mistake in trying Adam alone in theGarden, 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 tocrown the curse and make it real, God drove the sinful pair forth fromthe Garden and condemned them to farm for a living. 

"That's it, " Joel muttered with a mourner's groan. "That's Holy Writon farmin' as _I_ understand it. Now, where's the other story?"

"Here it is, " I answered, "but we 've got to have some fresh air andmore light on it, " rising as I spoke and reaching for the bolt on thefront door. With a single quick jerk I had it back, and throwingmyself forward, swung the door wide to the open sky, while Joel groanedagain, and the big, rusty hinges thrice groaned at the surprise andshock 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 thatstretched from the very doorstep to a distant hill of pines, andthrough 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 prospect. 

"Let's sit here on the millstone step, " I said, bringing the Bible outinto the fresh air, "and I 'll read you something you never heardbefore, " and I read, --laying the emphasis so as to render a new thingof the old story, --"In the beginning God created the heaven and theearth, and the earth was without form and void; and darkness was uponthe face of the deep. And the spirit of God moved upon the face of thewaters. And God said, Let there be light; and there was light. AndGod saw the light that it was good. And God divided the light from thedarkness. And God called the light day, and the darkness he callednight. 

"And the evening and the morning were the first day. "

Starting each new phase of the tale with "And God said, " and bringingit to a close with "And God saw that it was good, " I read on throughthe seas and dry land, the sun and stars, and all living things, to manand woman--"male and female created he them"--and in his own likeness, blessing them and crowning the blessing with saying, "Be fruitful andmultiply and replenish the earth and _subdue_ it, "--farm for a living;rounding out the whole marvelous story with the sweet refrain: "And Godsaw _everything_ 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 helooked out for the first time over his new meadow, --"_thus_, accordingto my belief, and not as you have been reading it, were the heavens andthe earth finished and all the host of them. "

He took the old book in his lap and sat silent with me for a while onthe step. Then he said:--

"Nobody has got to the bottom of that book yet, have they? And it'strue; it's all true. It's just accordin' as you see it. Do ye knowwhat I'm going to do? I 'm going to buy one of them double-seated redswings and put it right out here under this sassafras tree, and Hannahand I are going to set in, and swing in it, and listen a little to thembobolinks. "

[Illustration: A pilgrim from Dubuque]

VIII

A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE

It is a long road from anywhere to Mullein Hill, and only the ruralpostman and myself travel it at all frequently. The postman goes by, if he can, every weekday, somewhere between dawn and dark, the absoluteuncertainty of his passing quite relieving the road of its woodedloneliness. I go back and forth somewhat regularly; now and then aneighbor takes this route to the village, and at rarer intervals anautomobile speeds over the "roller coaster road"; but seldom does astranger on foot appear so far from the beaten track. One who walks toMullein Hill deserves and receives a welcome. 

I may be carting gravel when he comes, as I was the day the Pilgrimfrom Dubuque arrived. Swinging the horses into the yard with theirstaggering load, I noticed him laboring up the Hill by the road infront. He stopped in the climb for a breathing spell, --a tall, erectold man in black, with soft, high-crowned hat, and about him something, even at the distance, that was--I don'tknow--unusual--old-fashioned--Presbyterian. 

Dropping the lines, I went down to greet the stranger, though I saw hecarried a big blue book under his arm. To my knowledge no book-agenthad ever been seen on the Hill. But had I never seen one anywhere Ishould have known this man had not come to sell me a book. "Morelikely, " 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 surelyprofessional, he was not exactly clerical, in spite of a certainScotch-Covenanter-something in his appearance. He had never preachedat men, I knew, as instinctively as I knew he had never persuaded themwith books or stocks or corner-lots in Lhassa. He had a fine, kindlyface, that was singularly clear and simple, in which blent the shadowsand 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 LoreSharp, but these are not his over-alls--not yet; for they have neverbeen washed and are about three sizes too large for him. "

He looked at me, a little undone, I thought, disappointed, maybe, and abit embarrassed at having been betrayed by overalls and rolled-upsleeves and shovels. He had not expected the overalls, not new ones, anyhow. And why are new overalls so terribly new and unwashed! Only awoman, only a man's wife, is fitted to buy his overalls, for she onlyis capable of allowing enough for shrinkage. To-day I was in my newpair, but not of them, not being able to get near enough to them forthat. 

"I am getting old, " he went on quickly, his face clearing; "myperceptions 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-literaryexistence as lived reality; the writing must be only the necessaryaccident of its being lived over again in thought'"--quoting verbatim, though I was slow in discovering it, from an essay of mine, publishedyears before. 

It was now my turn to allow for shrinkage. Had he learned this passagefor the visit and applied it thus by chance? My face must have showedmy 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 allowances necessary he assuredme, --

"Oh, no, sir! I am quite at home in the hills of Hingham. I have beenout at Concord for a few days, and am now on the main road from Concordto Dubuque. I am Mr. Kinnier, Dr. Kinnier, of Dubuque, Iowa, and"--releasing my hand--"let me see"--pausing as we reached the top ofthe hill, and looking about in search of something--"Ah, yes [tohimself], 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 forword, from another of my essays. Then to me: "They are a littlefarther away and a little closer together than I expected to seethem--too close [to himself again] for God to tell from which side ofthe street the prayers and praises come, mingling as they must in theair. "

He said it with such thought-out conviction, such sweet sorrow, andwith such relief that I began now to fear for what he might quote nextand _miss_ from the landscape. The spires were indeed there (mayneither one of them now be struck by lightning!); but what a terriblememory the man has! Had he come from Dubuque to prove me--

The spires, however, seemed to satisfy him; he could steer by them; andto my great relief, he did not demand a chart to each of the wonders ofMullein Hill--my thirty-six woodchuck holes, etc. , etc. , nor ask, asJohn Burroughs did, for a sight of the fox that performed in one of mybooks somewhat after the manner of modern _literary_ foxes. Literaryfoxes! One or another of us watches this Hilltop day and night with agun for literary foxes! I want no pilgrims from Dubuque, nonaturalists from Woodchuck Lodge, poking into the landscape or underthe stumps for spires and foxes and boa constrictors and things thatthey cannot find outside the book. I had often wondered what I woulddo if such visitors ever came. Details, I must confess, might on manypages be difficult to verify; but for some years now I have faithfullykept my four boys here in the woods to prove the reality of my maintheme. 

This morning, with heaps of gravel in the yard, the hilltop lookedanything but like the green and fruitful mountain of the book, stillless like a way station between anywhere and _Concord_! And as formyself--it was no wonder he said to me, --

"Now, sir, please go on with your teaming. I ken the lay of the landabout Mullein Hill

 "'Whether the simmer kindly warms Wi' life and light, Or winter howls in gusty storms The lang, dark night. '"

But I did not go on with the teaming. Gravel is a thing that willwait. 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 Dubuquemust be stopped as they pass. So we sat down and talked--of books andmen, of poems and places, but mostly of books, --books I had written, and other books--great books "whose dwelling is the light of settingsuns. " Then we walked--over the ridges, down to the meadow and thestream, and up through the orchard, still talking of books, my strangevisitor, whether the books were prose or poetry, catching up the volumesomewhere with a favorite passage, and going on--reading on--frommemory, line after line, pausing only to repeat some exquisite turn, orto comment upon some happy thought. 

Not one book was he giving me, but many. The tiny leather-bound copyof Burns that he drew from his coat pocket he did not give me, however, but fondly holding it in his hands said:--

"It was my mother's. She always read to us out of it. She knew everyline of it by heart as I do. 

"'Some books are lies frae end to end'--

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-roomwhere a few sticks were burning on the hearth. Taking one of therocking-chairs before the fireplace, the Pilgrim sat for a time lookinginto the blaze. Then he began to rock gently back and forth, his eyesfixed upon the fire, quite forgetful evidently of my presence, andwhile he rocked his lips moved as, half audibly, he began to speak withsome one--not with me--with some one invisible to me who had come tohim out of the flame. I listened as he spoke, but it was a languagethat I could not understand. 

Then remembering where he was he turned to me and said, his eyes goingback again beyond the fire, --

"She often comes to me like this; but I am very lonely since she leftme, --lonely--lonely--and so I came on to Concord to visit Thoreau'sgrave. "

And this too was language I could not understand. I watched him insilence, wondering what was behind his visit to me. 

"Thoreau was a lonely man, " he went on, "as most writers are, I think, but Thoreau was very lonely. "

"Wild, " Burroughs had called him; "irritating, " I had called him; andon the table beside the Pilgrim lay even then a letter from Mr. Burroughs, in which he had taken me to task on behalf of Thoreau. 

"I feel like scolding you a little, " ran the letter, "for disparagingThoreau for my benefit. Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am. I maybe more human, but he is certainly more divine. His moral and ethicalvalue I think is much greater, and he has a heroic quality that Icannot 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 andself-consciousness. A "counter-irritant" he called himself. Was thisnot true?

As if in answer to my question, as if to explain his coming out toMullein Hill, the Pilgrim drew forth a folded sheet of paper from hispocket and without opening it or looking at it, said:--

"I wrote it the other day beside Thoreau's grave. You love yourThoreau--you will understand. "

And then in a low, thrilling voice, timed as to some solemn chant, hebegan, 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. 

 "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. "

The chanting voice died away and--the woods were still. The deepwaters of Walden darkened in the long shadows of the trees that werereaching out across the pond. Evening was close at hand. Would theveery sing again? Or was it the faint, sweet music of the bells ofLincoln, Acton, and Concord that I heard, humming in the pine needlesoutside the window, as if they were the strings of a harp?

The chanting voice died away and--the room was still; but I seem tohear that voice every time I open the pages of "The Week" or "Walden. "And the other day, as I stood on the shores of the pond, adding mystone to the cairn where the cabin used to stand, a woodthrush off inthe trees (trees that have grown great since Thoreau last looked uponthem), 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. "

[Illustration: The Honey Flow]

IX

THE HONEY FLOW

And this our life, exempt from public haunt and those swift currentsthat carry the city-dweller resistlessly into the movie show, leaves uscaught in the quiet eddy of little unimportant things, --digging amongthe rutabagas, playing the hose at night, casting the broody hens intothe "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 whiteclover and buckwheat and filled with the honey of nothing-to-do; everyminute of them capped, like the comb within the hive, against thecoming winter of my discontent. If, for the good of mankind, I couldwrite a new Commandment to the Decalogue, it would read: Thou shaltkeep a hive of bees. 

Let one begin early, and there is more health in a hive of bees than ina hospital; more honey, too, more recreation and joy for thephilosophic mind, though no one will deny that very many personsprepare themselves both in body and mind for the comforting rest andchange of the hospital with an almost solemn joy. 

But personally I prefer a hive of bees. They are a sure cure, it issaid, for rheumatism, the patient making bare the afflicted part, thenwith it stirring up the bees. But it is saner and happier to get thebees before you get the rheumatism and prevent its coming. No one cankeep bees without being impressed with the wisdom of the ounce ofprevention. 

I cannot think of a better habit to contract than keeping bees. What aquieting, pastoral turn it gives to life! You can keep them in thecity--on the roof or in the attic--just as you can actually live in thecity, if you have to; but bees, even more than cows, suggest a ruralprospect, old-fashioned gardens, pastures, idyls, --things out ofVirgil, 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 eternall 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 thebee-keeper and I will show you a poet; a lover of waters that go softlylike Siloa; with the breath of sage and pennyroyal about him; anobserver of nature, who can handle his bees without veil or gloves. Only a few men keep bees, --only philosophers, I have found. They are adifferent order utterly from hen-men, bee-keeping and chicken-raisingbeing respectively the poetry and prose of country life, though thereare some things to be said for the hen, deficient as the henyard is ineuphony, rhythm, and tune. 

In fact there is not much to be said for the bee, not much that thepublic can understand; for it is neither the bee nor the eagle that isthe true American bird, but the rooster. In one of my neighboringtowns five thousand petitioners recently prayed the mayor that they beallowed to let their roosters crow. The petition was granted. In allthat town, peradventure, not five bee-keepers could be found, and forthe same reason that so few righteous men were found in Sodom. 

Bee-keeping, like keeping righteous, is exceedingly difficult; it isone 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 anhundred thousand strong, are as individual as royal houses are liableto be. 

I have never had two queens alike, never two colonies that behaved thesame, never two seasons that made a repetition of a particular handlingpossible. A colony of bees is a perpetual problem; the strain of thebees, the age and disposition of the queen, the condition of thecolony, the state of the weather, the time of the season, thelittle-understood laws of the honey-flow, --these singly, and often allin combination, make the wisest handling of a colony of bees a questionfresh every summer morning and new every evening. 

For bees should be "handled, " that is, bees left to their own devicesmay make you a little honey--ten to thirty pounds in the best ofseasons; whereas rightly handled they will as easily make you threehundred pounds of pure comb honey--food of prophets, and with saleratusbiscuit instead of locusts, a favorite dish with the sons of prophetshere on Mullein Hill. 

Did you ever eat apple-blossom honey? Not often, for it is only rarelythat the colony can be built up to a strength sufficient to store thisearliest flow. But I have sometimes caught it; and then as the seasonadvances, and flow after flow comes on with the breaking of the greatfloral 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, bycareful watching, I get pure and true to flavor like so many fruitextracts at the soda fountains. 

Then sometimes the honey for a whole season will be adulterated, not byanything that I have done, but by the season's peculiar conditions, orby purely local conditions, --conditions that may not prevail in thenext town at all. 

One year it began in the end of July. The white clover flow was overand the bees were beginning to work upon the earliest blossoms of thedwarf sumac. Sitting in front of the hives soon after the renewedactivity commenced, I noticed a peculiarly rank odor on the air, andsaw that the bees in vast numbers were rising and making for a pasturesomewhere over the sprout-land that lay to the north of the hives. YetI felt sure there was nothing in blossom in that direction within rangeof my bees (they will fly off two miles for food); nothing but densehardwood undergrowth from stumps cut some few years before. 

Marking their line of flight I started into the low jungle to findthem. I was half a mile in when I caught the busy hum of wings. Ilooked but could see nothing, --not a flower of any sort, nothing butoak, maple, birch, and young pine saplings just a little higher than myhead. But the air was full of bees; yet not of swarming bees, for thatis a different and unmistakable hum. Then I found myself in the thickof a copse of witch-hazel up and down the stems of which the bees werewildly buzzing. There was no dew left on the bushes, so it was notthat they were after; on looking more closely I saw that they werecrawling down the stems to the little burrs containing the seed of lastfall's flowering. Holding to the top of the burr with their hind legsthey 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, insteadof seeds, a hollow filled with plant lice or aphides, that the beeswere milking. Here were big black ants, too, and yellow wasps drinkingfrom the same pail. 

But a bee's tongue, delicate as it is, would crush a fragile plantlouse. I picked another burr, squeezing it gently, when there issuedfrom the hole at the base a drop of crystal-clear liquid, held in thethinnest of envelopes, which I tasted and found sweet. In burr afterburr I found these sacks or cysts of sweets secreted by the aphides forthe bees to puncture and drain. The largest of them would fill a beeat a draught. Some of the burrs contained big fat grubs of a beetleunknown to me, --the creature that had eaten the seeds, bored the holeat 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 youcommand your bees to avoid these dire bushes and drink only of thewells at the bottoms of the white-clover tubes? Hardly that, but youcan clip the wing of your queen and make her obedient; you can commandthe colony not to swarm, not to waste its strength in drones, and youcan tell it where and how to put this affected honey so that the purecrop is not spoiled; you can order the going out and coming in of thosemany thousands so that every one is a faithful, wise, and efficientservant, gathering the fragrance and sweet of the summer from everybank whereon the clover and the wild mints blow. 

Small things these for a man with anything to do? Small indeed, butdemanding large love and insight, patience, foresight, and knowledge. It does not follow that a man who can handle a colony of bees can rulehis spirit or take a city, but the virtues absolutely necessary to thebee-keeper are those required for the guiding of nations; and thereshould be a bee-plank incorporated into every party platform, promisingthat president, cabinet, and every member of congress along with thephilosophers shall keep bees. 

[Illustration: A pair of pigs]

X

A PAIR OF PIGS

I dropped down beside Her on the back steps and took a handful of herpeas to pod. She set the colander between us, emptied half of her taskinto my hat, and said:--

"It is ten o'clock. I thought you had to be at your desk at eight thismorning? And you are hot and tired. What is it you have been doing?"

"Getting ready for the _pigs_, " I replied, laying marked and steadyemphasis on the plural. 

"You are putting the pods among the peas and the peas with thepods"--and so I was. "Then we are going to have another pig, " she wenton. 

"No, not _a_ pig this time; I think I 'll get a pair. You see whileyou are feeding one you can just as well be feeding--"

"A lot of them, " she said with calm conviction. 

"You 're right!" I exclaimed, a little eagerly. "Besides two pigs dobetter than--"

"Well, then, " very gravely and never pausing for an instant in hershelling, "let's fence in the fourteen acres and have a nice littlepiggery of Mullein Hill. "

The pods popped and split in her nimble fingers as if she knew a secretspring in their backs. I can beat her picking peas, but in shellingpeas she seems to have more fingers than I have; they quite confuse meat times as they twinkle at their task. 

So they did now. I had spent several weeks working up my brief for twopigs; but was utterly unprepared for a whole piggery. The suddennessof it, the sweep and compass of it, left me powerless to pod the peasfor a moment. 

I ought to have been at my writing, but it was too late to mention thatnow; besides here was my hat still full of peas. I could notungallantly dump them back into her empty pan and quit. There wasnothing for it but to pod on and stop with one pig. But my heart wasset on a pair of pigs. College had just closed (we were having our17th of June peas) and the joy of the farm was upon me. I had a cowand a heifer, eighty-six hens, three kinds of bantams, ten hives ofbees, and two ducks. I was planning to build a pigeon coop, and hadlong talked of turning the nine-acre ridge of sprout land joining myfarm into a milch goat pasture, selling the milk at one dollar a quartto Boston babies; I had thought somewhat of Belgian hares and blackfoxes as a side-line; and in addition to these my heart was set on apair of pigs. 

"Why won't one pig do?" she would ask. And I tried to explain; butthere are things that cannot be explained to the feminine mind, thingsperfectly clear to a man that you cannot make a woman see. 

Pigs, I told her, naturally go by pairs, like twins and scissors andtongs. They do better together, as scissors do. Nobody ever bought a_scissor_. Certainly not. Pigs need the comfort of one another'ssociety, and the diversion of one another to take up their minds in thepen; hens I explained were not the only broody creatures, for allanimals show the tendency, and does not the Preacher say, "Two arebetter than one: if two lie together then have they heat: but how canone be warm alone"?

I was sure, I told her, that the Preacher had pigs in mind, for judgingby the number of pig-prohibitions throughout Hebrew literature, theymust have had pigs _constantly_ in mind. This observation of the earlyHebrew poet and preacher is confirmed, I added, by all the modernagricultural journals, as well as by all our knowing neighbors. Eventhe Flannigans (an Irish family down the road), --even the Flannigans, Ipointed out, always have two pigs, for all their eight children and hisjob tending gate at the railroad crossing. They have a goat, too. Ifa man with that sort of job can have eight children and a goat and twopigs, 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 pighis two. Flannigan has the finest pigs on the road. He has awonderful 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: 'Forshure, a pair o' pags is double wan pag, ' says Flannigan--good clearlogic it strikes me, and quite convincing. "

She picked up the colander of shelled peas with a sigh. "We shall wantthe new potatoes and fresh salmon to go with these, " her mind not onpigs 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 newpotatoes, 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 youlook. You said you did n't leave the key outside in the door yesterdaywhen we went to town, but you did. And as for a lot of pigs--"

"I don't want a lot of pigs, " I protested. 

"But you do, though. You want a lot of everything. Here you 'veplanted five hundred cabbages for winter just as if we were asauerkraut factory--and the probabilities are we shall go to town thiswinter--"

"Go where!" I cried. 

"And as for pigs, your head is as full of pigs as Deerfoot Farm or theChicago stockyards--

 _Mullein Hill Sausages Made of Little Pigs_

that's really your dream"--spelling out the advertisement with pea-podson the porch floor. 

"Now, don't you think it best to save some things for yourchildren, --this sausage business, say, --and you go on with your humblethemes and books?"

She looked up at me patiently, sweetly inscrutable as she added:--

"You need a pig, Dallas, one pig, I am quite sure; but two pigs arenothing short of the pig business, and that is not what we are livinghere on Mullein Hill for. "

She went in with her peas and left me with my pigs--or perhaps theywere her thoughts; leaving 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, deepdown and unperceived, except by their wives, perhaps, traits andtendencies that call for the keeping of a pig. I think this must beso, for while she has always said we need the cow or the chickens orthe parsley, she has never spoken so of the pig, it being referred toinvariably as mine, until put into the cellar in a barrel. 

The pig as my property, or rather as my peculiar privilege, is utterlyunrelated in her mind to _salt_ pork. And she is right about that. Noman needs a pig to put in a barrel. Everybody knows that it costs lessto buy your pig in the barrel. And there is little that is edifyingabout a barrel of salt pork. I always try to fill my mind withcheerful thoughts before descending into the dark of the cellar to fisha cold, white lump of the late pig out of the pickle. 

Not in the uncertain hope of his becoming pork, but for the certainpresent joy of his _being_ pork, does a man need a pig. In all hisother possessions man is always to be blest. In the pig he has aconstant, present reward: because the pig _is_ and there is no questionas 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 withheat; and while not so volatile and spirit-like as butter, neverthelessit is one of earth's pure essences, perfected, sublimated, not afterthe soul with suffering, but after the flesh with corn and solidcomfort--the most abundant of one's possessions, yet except to the pigthe most difficult of all one's goods to bestow. 

The pig has no soul. I am not so sure of the flower in the cranniedwall, not so sure of the very stones in the wall, so long have theybeen, so long shall be; but the pig--no one ever plucked up a pig fromhis 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"--

No poet or philosopher ever did that. But they have kept pigs. Hereis Matthew Arnold writing to his mother about _Literature and Dogma_and poems and--"The two pigs are grown very large and handsome, andPeter Wood advises us to fatten them and kill our own bacon. Weconsume a great deal of bacon, and Flu complains that it is dear andnot good, so there is much to be said for killing our own; but she doesnot 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 oftenwent 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 littleroast pig; and what an escape from books and people and parlors (inthis country) is the feeding and littering and scratching of him! Youput on your old clothes for him. He takes you out behind the barn;there shut away from the prying gaze of the world, and the stern eye, conscience, you deliberately fill him, stuff him, fatten him, till hegrunts, then you scratch him to keep him grunting, yourself reveling inthe sight of the flesh indulged, as you dare not indulge any otherflesh. You would love to feed the whole family that way; only it wouldnot be good for them. You cannot feed even the dog or the horse or thehens so. One meal a day for the dog; a limited ration of timothy forthe horse, and _scratch_-feed, for the hens--feed to compel them toscratch for fear they will run to flesh instead of eggs; and thechildren's wedge of pie you sharpen though the point of it pierces yoursoul; and the potato you leave off of her plate; and you forgoyour--you get _you_ a medicine ball, I should say, in order to keepdown the fat lest it overlie and smother the soul. 

Compelled to deny and subject the body, what do I then but get me a pigand feed _it_, and scratch it, and bed it in order to see it fatten andto hear it snore? The flesh cries out for indulgence; but the spiritdemands virtue; and a pig, being the virtue of indulgence, satisfiesthe flesh and is winked at by the soul. 

If a pig is the spirit's concession to the flesh, no less is he attimes a gift to the spirit. There are times in life when one needsjust such companionship as the pig's, and just such shelter as onefinds within his pen. After a day in the classroom discoursing on thefourth dimension of things in general, I am prone to feel somewhatremoved, at sea somewhat. 

Then I go down and spread my arms along the fence and come to anchorwith the pig. 

[Illustration: Leafing]

XI

LEAFING

Poets, I said, have kept pigs for an escape from their poetry. Butkeeping pigs is not all prose. I put my old clothes on to feed him, itis true; he takes me out behind the barn; but he also takes me one dayin the year out into the woods--a whole day in the woods--with rake andsacks 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; andof all our days in the woods surely none of them is fresher, morefragrant, more joyous, and fuller of poetry than the day we go to rakeand sack and bring home the leaves for the pig. 

You never went after leaves for the pigs? Perhaps you never even had apig. But a pig is worth having, if only to see the comfort he takes inthe 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 andzest enough to the labor. 

But leafing like every other humble labor of our life here in the Hillsof Hingham has its own reward, --and when you can say that of any laboryou are speaking of its poetry. 

We jolt across the bumpy field, strike into the back wood-road, andturn off upon an old stumpy track over which cordwood was carted yearsago. Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded hill the windshave 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 straddlestumps, bend down saplings, stop while the horse takes a bite of sweetbirch, tack and tip and tumble and back through the tight squeezesbetween the trees; and finally, after a prodigious amount of "whoa"-ingand "oh"-ing and squealing and screeching, we land right side up and soheaded 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 stumpyou hit, yell every time a limb knocks off your hat or catches youunder the chin, yell when the horse stops suddenly to browse on thetwigs, 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 crazycapers you know; for this is a Saturday; these are the wild woods andthe noisy leaves; and who is there looking on besides the mocking jaysand 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 ofthe 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, of the pig. The thought is pleasing. The warmglow all over your body strikes in to your heart. You rake away as ifit were your own bed you were gathering--as really it is. He thatrakes for his pig rakes also for himself. A merciful man is mercifulto his beast, and he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanketof down over his own winter bed. 

Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull on my boots at teno'clock and go my round at the barn? Yet it does warm my feet, throughand 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 inhis golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to the pig's pen, tohear him snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in the depths ofhis leaf-bed, far out of sight. It warms my feet, it also warms myheart. 

So the leaves pile up. How good a thing it is to have a pig to workfor! What zest and purpose it lends to one's raking and piling andstoring! If I could get nothing else to spend myself on, I shouldsurely get me a pig. Then, when I went to walk in the woods, I shouldbe obliged occasionally to carry a rake and a bag with me, much betterthings to take into the woods than empty hands, and sure to scratchinto light a number of objects that would never come within the rangeof opera-glass or gun or walking-stick. To see things through atwenty-four-toothed rake is to see them very close, as through amicroscope magnifying twenty-four diameters. 

And so, as the leaves pile up, we keep a sharp lookout for what therake uncovers; here under a rotten stump a hatful of acorns, probablygathered by the white-footed wood-mouse. For the stump "gives" at thetouch of the rake, and a light kick topples it down hill, spilling outa big nest of feathers and three dainty little creatures that scurryinto the leaf-piles like streaks of daylight. They are thewhite-footed mice, long-tailed, big-eared, and as clean andhigh-bred-looking as greyhounds. 

Combing down the steep hillside with our rakes, we dislodge a largestone, exposing a black patch of fibrous roots and leaf-mould, in whichsomething moves and disappears. Scooping up a double handful of themould, we capture a little red-backed salamander. 

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 speakout of every tree-trunk!) and find the piper clinging to a twig, nosalamander at all, but a tiny wood-frog. Pickering's hyla, his littlebagpipe blown almost to bursting as he tries to rally the scatteredsummer by his tiny, mighty "skirl. " Take him nose and toes, he issurely as much as an inch long; not very large to pipe against thisnorth 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 Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncovertrailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimsonberries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, andwintergreen red with ripe berries--a whole bouquet of evergreens, exquisite, fairy-like forms that later shall gladden our Christmastable. 

But how they gladden and cheer the October woods! Summer dead? Hopeall gone? Life vanished away? See here, under this big pine, a wholegarden of arbutus, green and budded, almost ready to bloom! The snowsshall come before their sweet eyes open; but open they will at the veryfirst touch of spring. We will gather a few, and let them wake up insaucers of clean water in our sunny south windows. 

Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us! We make a clean sweep down thehillside "jumping" a rabbit from its form under a brush-pile, discovering where a partridge roosts in a low-spreading hemlock; comingupon a snail cemetery in a hollow hickory stump; turning up ayellow-jackets' nest built two thirds underground; tracing the tunnelof a bobtailed mouse in its purposeless windings in the leaf-mould, digging into a woodchuck's--

"But come, boys, get after those bags! It is leaves in the hay-rig wewant, not woodchucks at the bottom of woodchuck-holes. "

Two small boys catch up a bag, and hold it open, while two more stuffin the crackling leaves. Then I come along with my big feet, and packthe leaves in tight, and on to the rig goes the bulging bag. 

Exciting? If you can't believe it exciting, hop up on the load, andlet us jog you home. Swish! bang! thump! tip! turn! joggle! jolt!Hold on to your ribs. Pull in your popping eyes. Look out for thestump! Isn't it fun to go leafing? Is n't it fun to do anything thatyour 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 hislaugh. We double up and weep when we laugh hard; but the pig can'tweep, and he can't double himself up; so he doubles up his tail. Thereis where his laugh comes off, curling and kinking in little spasms ofpure pig joy. 

"Boosh! Boosh!" he snorts, and darts around the pen like a whirlwind, scattering the leaves in forty ways, to stop short--the shorteststop!--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 hestill remembers the smell of the forest leaves; he still knows thetaste of the acorn-mast; he is still wild pig somewhere deep downwithin him. 

And we were once long-haired, strong-limbed savages who roamed theforest for him--ages and ages ago. And we, too, like him, remember thesmell of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the forest fruits, and ofpig, _roast_ pig. And if the pig in his heart is still a wild boar, noless are we at times wild savages in our hearts. 

Anyhow, for one day in the fall I want to go leafing. I want to givemy pig a taste of acorns, and a big pile of leaves to dive so deep intothat he cannot see his pen. No, I do not live in a pen; I do not wantto; but surely I might, if once in a while I did not go leafing, didnot escape now and then from my little penned-in, daily round into thewide, sweet woods, my ancestral home. 

[Illustration: The little foxes]

XII

THE LITTLE FOXES

I was picking strawberries down by the woods when some one called outfrom 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 chickenslately. "

"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 pupsstarve to death, he ain't no better than a brute, he ain't. I 'vehunted two days for 'em; and I 'll hunt till I find 'em. " And hedisappeared into the woods, on my side of the road, upon a quest soutterly futile, apparently, and so entirely counter to the notion I hadhad of the man, that I stopped my picking and followed him up theridge, just to see which way a man would go to find a den of sucklingfoxes in all the miles and miles of swamp and ledgy woodland thatspread 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 hearingthrough the thick sprout-land. I sat down, however, upon a stump tothink about him, this man of the shoeshop, working his careful way upand down the bushy slopes, around the granite ledges, across the bogsand up-grown pastures, into the matted green-brier patches, hour afterhour searching for a hole in the ground a foot wide, for a den oflittle foxes that were whimpering and starving because their mother didnot return. 

He found them--two miles away in the next town, on the edge of an openfield, near a public road, and directly across from a schoolhouse! Idon't know how he found them. But patience and knowledge and love, anda wild, primitive instinct that making shoes had never taken out of hisprimitive nature, helped him largely in his hunt. He took them, nursedthem back to strength on a bottle, fed them milk and rice until theycould 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 aholiday 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 lowerbars last winter. It is now strawberry time again, and again an oldshe-fox lies in wait for every hen that flies over the chicken-yardfence--which means another litter of young foxes somewhere here in theridges. 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 lineperish forever from the earth. As the unthinkable ages of geology comeand go, animal and vegetable forms arise, change, and disappear; butlife persists, lines lead on, and in some form many of the ancientfamilies breathe our air and still find a home on this small andsmaller-growing globe of ours. 

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 beingswept faster and faster toward the brink of the world; but it ischeering to look out of my window, as I write, and see the brownthrasher getting food for her young out of the lawn, to hear thescratch of squirrels' feet across the porch, to catch a faint and notunpleasant odor of skunk through the open window as the breeze blows infrom the woods, and to find, as I found in hoeing my melons early thismorning, the pointed prints of a fox making in a confident and knowingline toward the chicken-yard. 

I have lived some forty years upon the earth (how the old hickoryoutside my window mocks me!), and I have seen some startling changes inwild animal life. Even I can recall a great flock of snowy herons, oregrets, that wandered up from the South one year and stayed a while onthe Maurice River marshes, just as, in earlier times, it is recordedthat along the Delaware "the white cranes did whiten the river-banklike a great snow-drift. " To-day the snowy herons have all butvanished from the remotest glades of the South; and my friend Finley, on the trail of the Western plume-hunters, searched in vain for asingle 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 lovelyplumes; he found nests with eggs and dead young, but no live birds; thefamily of snowy herons, the whole race, apparently, had been suddenlyswept off the world, annihilated, and was no more. 

A few men with guns--for money--had done it. And the wild areas of theworld, especially of our part of the world, have grown so limited nowthat a few men could easily, quickly destroy, blot out from the book oflife, almost any of our bird and animal families. "Thou madest him tohave dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all thingsunder his feet"--literally, and he must go softly now lest the veryfowl of the air and fish of the sea be destroyed forever. Within mymemory the passenger pigeon, by some cataclysm perhaps, has apparentlybecome extinct; and the ivory-billed woodpecker probably, this latterby the hand of man, for I knew the man who believed that he had killedthe last pair of these noble birds reported from the Florida forests. So we thought it had fared also with the snowy heron, but recently wehave had word from the wardens of the Audubon Society that a remnanthas escaped; a few pairs of the birds have been discovered along theGulf coast--so hardly can Nature forgo her own! So far away does themother of life hide her child, and so cunningly!

With our immediate and intelligent help, this family of birds, fromthese few pairs can be saved and spread again over the savannas of theSouth and the wide tule lakes in the distant Northwest. 

The mother-principle, the dominant instinct in all life, is not failingin our time. As Nature grows less capable (and surely she does!) ofmothering her own, then man must turn mother, as he has in the AudubonSociety; as he did in the case of the fellow from the shoe-shop whosaved the little foxes. And there is this to hearten him, that, whileextinction of the larger forms of animal life seems inevitable in thefuture, a little help and constant help now will save even the largestof our animals for a long time to come. 

The way animal life hangs on against almost insuperable odds, and thepower in man's hands to further or destroy it, is quite past beliefuntil one has watched carefully the wild creatures of a thickly settledregion. 

The case of the Indian will apply to all our other aborigines. It issomewhat amazing to be told, as we are on good authority, that thereare probably more live Indians on the reservations to-day than therewere all told over all of North America when the white men first camehere. Certainly they have been persecuted, but they have also beengiven protection--pens!

Wild life, too, will thrive, in spite of inevitable persecution andrepression, if given only a measure of protection. 

Year by year the cities spread, the woods and wild places narrow, yetlife holds on. The fox trots free across my small farm, and helpshimself 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 long from much experience, and deep-lined withwisdom. He seems a normal part of civilization; he literally passes inand out of the city gates, roams at large through my town, and denswithin the limits of my farm. Enduring, determined, resourceful, quick-witted, soft-footed, he holds out against a pack of enemies thatkeep continually at his heels, and runs in his race the race of alllife, winning for all life, with our help, a long lease yet upon theearth. 

For here is Reynard sitting upon a knoll in the road, watching me teardown upon him in a thirty-horse-power motor-car. He steps into thebushes to let me pass, then comes back to the road and trots upon hisfour adequate legs back to the farm to see if I left the gate of thehenyard open. 

There is no sight of Nature more heartening to me than this glimpse ofthe fox; no thought of Nature more reassuring than the thought of theway Reynard holds his own--of the long-drawn, dogged fight that Naturewill put up when cornered and finally driven to bay. The globe is toosmall for her eternally to hold out against man; but with the help ofman, and then in spite of man, she will fight so good a fight that notfor years yet need another animal form perish from the earth. 

If I am assuming too much authority, it is because, here in theremoteness of my small woods where I can see at night the lights of thedistant city, I have personally taken a heartless hand in thisdetermined attempt to exterminate the fox. No, I do not raise fancychickens in order to feed him. On the contrary, much as I love to seehim, I keep a double-barreled gun against his coming. He knows it, andcomes just the same. At least the gun does not keep him away. Myneighbors 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 mychildren tiptoed into my room and whispered, "Father, there's the oldfox walking around Pigeon-Henny's coop behind the barn. "

I got up and hurried with the little fellow into his room, and sureenough, there in the fog of the dim morning I could make out the formof a fox moving slowly around the small coop. 

The old hen was clucking in terror to her chicks, her cries havingawakened the small boys. 

I got myself down into the basement, seized my gun, and, gliding outthrough the cellar door, crept stealthily into the barn. 

The back window was open. The thick, wet fog came pouring in likesmoke. I moved up boldly through the heavy smother and looked downinto the field. There was the blur of the small coop, but where wasthe fox?

Pushing the muzzle of my double-barreled gun out across thewindow-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 flutteringand crying in fresh terror. 

Carefully, noiselessly, I swung the muzzle of the gun around on thewindow-sill until the bead drew dead upon the thief. The cow in herstall beside me did not stir. I knew that four small boys in thebedroom window had their eyes riveted upon that fox waiting for me tofire. It was a nervous situation, so early in the morning, in thecold, 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, steadyingthe 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 bothbarrels went off together. A gun is a sudden thing any time of day, but so early in the morning, and when everything was wrapped in silenceand the ocean fog, the double explosion was extremely startling. 

I should have fired only one barrel, for the fox, after jumping, turnedaround and looked all over the end of the barn to see if the shootingwere going to happen again. I wished then that I had saved the otherbarrel. 

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 goingout 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, nor do I come in forany particular credit this time; but the little drama does illustratethe chances in the game of life, chances that sometimes, usuallyindeed, are in favor of the fox. 

He not only got away, but he also got away with eleven out of thetwelve young chicks in that brood. He had dug a hole under the wire ofthe coop, then, by waiting his chance, or by frightening the chicksout, had eaten all of them but one. 

That he escaped this time was sheer luck; that he got his breakfastbefore escaping was due to his cunning. And I have seen so manyinstances of his cunning that, with my two scientific eyes wide open, Icould believe him almost as wise as he was thought to be in the oldendays of fable and folk-lore. How cool and collected he can be, too!

One day last autumn I was climbing the steep ridge behind themowing-field when I heard a fox-hound yelping over in the hollowbeyond. Getting cautiously to the top of the ridge, I saw the houndoff below me on the side of the parallel ridge across the valley. Hewas beating slowly along through the bare sprout-land, and evidentlyhaving a hard time holding the trail. Now and then he would throw hishead 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 deliberateas 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 ofever hitting it (I don't know which), he would stand stock-still andhowl. 

That the hound was tired I felt sure; but that he was on the trail of afox I could not believe; and I was watching him curiously whensomething stirred on the top of the ridge almost beside me. 

Without turning so much as my head, I saw the fox, a beautifulcreature, going slowly round and round in a circle--in a figure eight, rather--among the bushes; then straight off it went and back; off againin another direction and back; then in and out, round and round, utterly without hurry, until, taking a long leap down the steephillside, the wily creature was off at an easy trot. 

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 inand out, back and forth, sniffling and whimpering like a tired child, beating gradually out into a wider and wider circle, and giving the foxall the rest it could want, before taking up the lead again andfollowing on down the trail. 

The hound knew what he was about; but so did the fox: the latter, moreover, taking the initiative, inventing the trick, leading the run, and so in the end not only escaping the hound, but also vastly wideningthe distance between their respective wits and abilities. 

I recently witnessed a very interesting instance of this superiority ofthe fox. One of the best hunters in my neighborhood, a man widelyknown for the quality of his hounds, sold a dog, Gingles, anextraordinarily fine animal, to a hunter in a near-by town. The newowner brought his dog down here to try him out. 

The hound was sent into the woods and was off in a moment on a warmtrail. But it was not long before the baying ceased, and shortlyafter, back came the dog. The new owner was disappointed; but the nextday he returned and started the dog again, only to have the same thinghappen, the dog returning in a little while with a sheepish air ofhaving 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 thetrail and following on after him as fast as he could break his waythrough the woods. Suddenly, as in the trials before, the bayingceased, 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 wasdislodged, and the dog carried him on in a course that was to his newowner's entire satisfaction. 

The fox jumped into the ashes to save himself. Just so have the swiftsleft 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 screechowls to my apple trees, the red squirrel for its nest to my ice-house, and the flat-nosed adder to the sandy knoll by my beehives. I havetaken over from its wild inhabitants fourteen acres in Hingham; but, beginning with the fox, the largest of my wild creatures, and countingonly what we commonly call "animals" (beasts, birds, and reptiles), there are dwelling with me, being fruitful and multiplying, here onthis small plot of cultivated earth this June day, some seventy speciesof wild things--thirty-six in feathers, fourteen in furs (not reckoningin the muskrat on the other side of the road), twelve in scales, fourin shells, nine in skins (frogs, newts, salamanders)--seventy-five inall. 

Here is a multiple life going serenely and abundantly on in anenvironment whose utter change from the primeval is hardly exaggeratedby phoebe's shift for a nest from a mossy ledge in the heart of theancient woods to a joist close up against the hot roof of my pigpenbehind the barn. From this very joist, however, she has alreadybrought 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 raceendures, why should not the line of phoebes also endure? The case ofthe 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 foxhalf the chance we give to phoebe, he too shall endure. 

I had climbed the footpath from the meadow late one autumn evening, andstood leaning back upon a short hay-fork, looking into the calmmoonlight that lay over the frosted field, and listening to the houndsbaying in the swamp far away to the west of me. You have heard atnight the passing of a train beyond the mountains; the creak ofthole-pins round a distant curve in the river; the closing of a barndoor somewhere down the valley. The far-off cry of the hounds wasanother such friendly and human voice calling across the vast of thenight. 

How clear their cries and bell-like! How mellow in the distance, ringing on the rim of the moonlit sky, round the sides of a swingingsilver bell! Their clanging tongues beat all in unison, the soundrising and falling through the rolling woodland and spreading like acurling wave as the pack broke into the open over the level meadows. 

I caught myself picking out the individual voices as they spoke, for aninstant, singly and unmistakable, under the wild excitement of thedrive, then all together, a fiercer, faster chorus as the chase sweptunhindered across the meadows. 

What was that? A twig that broke, some brittle oak leaf that crackedin the path behind me! I held my breath as a soft sound of padded feetcame up the path, as something stopped, breathed, came on--as into themoonlight, beyond the circle of shadow in which I stood, walked the fox. 

The dogs were now very near and coming as swift as their eager legscould carry them. But I was standing still, so still that the fox didnot recognize me as anything more than a stump. 

No, I was more than a stump; that much he saw immediately. But howmuch 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, creptgingerly up and sniffed at my shoes!

But my shoes had been soaked for an hour in the dew of the meadow andseemed to tell him little. So he backed off, and sat down upon histail in the edge of the pine-tree shadow to watch me. He might haveoutwatched me, though I kept amazingly still, but the hounds werecrashing through the underbrush below, and he must needs be off. Getting carefully up, he trotted first this side of me, then that, fora better view, then down the path up which he had just come, and intothe very throat of the panting clamor, when, leaping lightly aside overa pile of brush and stones, he vanished as the dogs broke madly aboutme. 

Cool? It was iced! And it was a revelation to me of what may be themind of Nature. I have never seen anything in the woods, never had aglimpse into the heart of Nature, that has given me so much confidencein the possibility of a permanent alliance between human life and wildlife, in the long endurance yet of our vastly various animal forms inthe midst of spreading farms and dooryards, as this deliberate dodge ofthe fox. 

At heart Nature is always just as cool and deliberate, capable alwaysof taking every advantage. She is not yet past the panic, and probablynever will be; but no one can watch the change of age-long habits inthe wild animals, their ready adaptability, their amazingresourcefulness, with any very real fears for what civilization may yethave in store for them so long as our superior wit is for, instead ofagainst, them. 

I have found myself present, more than once, at an emergency when onlymy helping hand could have saved; but the circumstances have seldombeen due to other than natural causes--very rarely man-made. On thecontrary, man-made conditions out of doors--the multiplicity of fences, gardens, fields, crops, trees, for the primeval uniformity of forest orprairie--are all in favor of greater variety and more abundance of wildlife (except for the larger forms), because all of this means morekinds of foods, more sorts of places for lairs and nests, more pathsand short cuts and chances for escape--all things that help preservelife. 

One morning, about two weeks ago, I was down by the brook along theroad, when I heard a pack of hounds that had been hunting in the woodsall night, bearing down in my direction. 

It was a dripping dawn, everything soaked in dew, the leaf edgesbeaded, the grass blades bent with wet, so that instead of creepinginto the bushes to wait for the hunt to drive by, I hurried up the roadto 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 thetrout brook turns at the foot of the slope, for here the fox, if on themeadow side of the brook, would be pretty sure to cross--and there hestood!

I had hardly got my eyes upon the spot, when out through a tangle ofwild grapevine he wound, stopped, glanced up and down, then dug hisheels 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 bigbrush heavy and dragging with the dripping dew. He was running a raceburdened with a weight of fur almost equal to the weight of a full suitof water-soaked clothes upon a human runner; and he struck the openroad as if glad to escape from the wallow of wet grass and thicket thathad clogged his long course. 

On came the dogs, very close upon him; and I turned again to the bendin the brook to see them strike the road, when, flash, below me on theroad, with a rush of feet, a popping of dew-laid dust, the fox!--backinto the very jaws of the hounds!--Instead he broke into the tangle ofgrapevines out of which he had first come, just as the pack broke intothe road from _behind_ the mass of thick, ropy vines. 

Those dogs hit the plain trail in the road with a burst of noise andspeed that carried them through the cut below me in a howling gale, awhirlwind of dust, and down the hill and on. 

Not one of the dogs came back. Their speed had carried them on beyondthe 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 haddiscovered the trick to come back on the right lead. 

If I had had a _gun_! Yes, but I did not. But if I _had_ had a gun, it might have made no particular difference. Yet it is the gun thatmakes the difference--all the difference between much or little wildlife--life that our groves and fields may have at our hands now, asonce the forests and prairies had it directly from the hands of theLord. 

[Illustration: Our calendar]

XIII

OUR CALENDAR

There are four red-lettered calendars about the house: one with theSundays in red; one with Sundays and the legal holidays in red; one withthe Thursdays in red, --Thursday being publication day for the periodicalsending out the calendar, --and one, our own calendar, with several sortsof days in red--all the high festival days here on Mullein Hill, the lastto be added being the Pup's birthday which falls on September 15. 

Pup's Christian name is Jersey, --because he came to us from that dearland by express when he was about the size of two pounds of sugar, --anexplanation that in no manner accounts for all we went through in naminghim. The christening hung fire from week to week, everybody calling himanything, until New Year's. It had to stop here. Returning from thecity New Year's day I found, posted on the stand of my table-lamp, thecognomen done in red, this declaration:--

January 1, 1915

No person can call Jersey any other name but JERSEY. If anybody callshim any other name but Jersey, exceeding five times a day he will have toclean out his coop two times a day. 

This was as plain as if it had been written on the wall. Somebody atlast had spoken, and not as the scribes, either. 

We shall celebrate Jersey's first birthday September 15, and already onthe calendar the day is red--red, with the deep deep red of our sixhearts! He is just a dog, a little roughish-haired mixedScotch-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 becauseI am more than half through with my fourscore years and this is my firstdog! And the boys--this is their first dog, too, every stray and trampdog that they have brought home, having wandered off again. 

One can hardly imagine what that means exactly. Of course, we have hadother things, chickens and pigs and calves, rabbits, turtles, bantams, the woods and fields, books and kindling--and I have had Her and the fourboys, --the family that is, --till at times, I will say, I have not feltthe need of anything more. But none of these things is a dog, not eventhe boys. A dog is one of man's primal needs. "We want a dog!" had beena 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 electricself-starter and stopper. "

"No. Now, Father, "--and the little face in its Dutch-cut frame soberedseriously, --"it's something with four legs. "

"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, hippopot, a hippopota, m-u-smus--hippopotamus, _that's_ what it is!"

This had always made him laugh, being the way, as I had told him, that Ilearned to spell when I went to school; but to-day there was somethingdeep and solemn in his heart, and he turned away from my lightness withclose-sealed lips, while his eyes, winking hard, seemed suspiciouslyopen. I was half inclined to call him back and guess again. But had notevery one of the four boys been making me guess at that four-legged thingsince they could talk about birthdays? And were not the conditions ofour living as unfit now for four-legged things as ever? Besides, theyalready had the cow and the pig and a hundred two-legged hens. More livestock 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 youwant 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?"

"Bone ones. "

"Why! why! I don't know any bone-legged things. "

"Bones with hair on them. "

"Oh, you want a Teddybear--_you_, and coming eight! Well! Well! ButTeddybears have wire legs, I think, instead of bone. "

The set look settled once more on his little, square face and the talkceased. But the fight was on. Day after day, week after week, he had meguessing--through all the living quadrupeds--through all the fossilforms--through many that the Lord did not make, but might have made, hadAdam only known enough Greek and Latin to give them names. Gently, persistently, he kept me guessing as the far-off day drew near, thoughlong 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 Princeton when all four boys leanedforward from the back seat, and Babe, close in my ear, said:--

"Shall I have any birthday down here, Father?"

"Certainly. "

"Have you guessed _what_ yet?"

I blew the horn fiercely, opened up the throttle till the words weresnatched from his teeth by the swirling dust behind and conversation wasmade impossible. Two days later, the birthday found us at Uncle Joe's. 

Babe was playing with Trouble, the little Scotch-Irish terrier, whenUncle Joe and I came into the yard. With Trouble in his arms Babe lookedup and asked:--

"Uncle Joe, could you guess what four-legged thing I want for mybirthday?"

"You want a dog, " said Uncle Joe, and I caught up the dear child in myarms and kept back his cries with kisses. 

"And you shall have one, too, if you will give me three or four weeks toget him for you. Trouble here is the daddy of--goodness! I suppose heis--of I don't know how many little puppies--but a good many--and I amgiving you one of them right now, for this birthday, only, you will waittill their mother weans them, of course?"

"Yes, yes, of course!"

And so it happened that several weeks later a tiny black-and-tan puppywith nothing much of a tail came through from New Jersey to Hingham tohearts that had waited for him very, very long. 

Pup's birthday makes the seventh red-letter day of that kind on thecalendar. These are only the beginning of such days, our own peculiardays when we keep tryst with ourselves, because in one way or anotherthese days celebrate some trial or triumph, some deep experience of thesoul. 

There is Melon Day, for example, --a movable feast-day in August, ifindeed it come so early, when we pick the first watermelon. That, youask, a deep emotional experience, an affair of the soul?

This is Massachusetts, dear reader, and I hail from the melon fields ofJersey. Even there a watermelon, to him who is spiritually minded, who, walking through a field of the radiant orbs (always buy an elongatedellipsoid for a real melon), hears them singing as they shine--even tothe Jerseyman, I say, the taste of the season's first melon is ofsomething out of Eden before the fall. But here in Massachusetts, Ah, the cold I fight, the drought I fight, the worms I fight, the blight Ifight, the striped bugs I fight, the will-to-die in the very vinesthemselves I fight, until at last (once it was the 7th of August!) theheart inside of one of the green rinds is red with ripeness, and ready tosplit 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 andcool from the dewy field, is prompt at breakfast, and puts a fervor intothe doxology that morning deeper far than is usual for the mere manna andquail gathered daily at the grocer's. 

We have been (once) to the circus, but that day is not in red. That iseverybody's day, while the red-letter days on ourcalendar--Storm-Door-and-Double-Window Day, for instance; or the dayclose to Christmas when we begin, "Marley was dead, to begin with"; orthe Day of the First Snow--these days are peculiarly, privately our own, and these are red. 

[Illustration: The Fields of Fodder]

XIV

THE FIELDS OF FODDER

It is doubtless due to early associations, to the large part played bycornfields in my boyhood, that I cannot come upon one now in these NewEngland farms without a touch of homesickness. It was always theautumn more than the spring that appealed to me as a child; and therewas something connected with the husking and the shocking of the cornthat took deeper hold upon my imagination than any other single eventof the farm year, a kind of festive joy, something solemnly beautifuland significant, that to this day makes a field of corn in the shocknot so much the substance of earth's bounty as the symbol of earth'slife, or rather of life--here on the earth as one could wish it tobe--lived to the end, and rich in corn, with its fodder garnered andset in order over a broad field. 

Perhaps I have added touches to this picture since the days when I wasa boy, but so far back as when I used to hunt out the deeply flutedcornstalks to turn into fiddles, it was minor notes I played--the notesof the wind coming over the field of corn-butts and stirring the looseblades as it moved among the silent shocks. I have more than a memoryof mere corn, of heavy-eared stalks cut and shocked to shed the winterrain: that, and more, as of the sober end of something, the fulfillmentof 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! Ihave heard my own small boys, with grave faces, announce that this isthe 21st of June, the longest day of the year--as if the shadows werealready lengthening, even across their morning way. 

If my spirit should return to earth as a flower, it would come afour-o'clock, or a yellow evening primrose, for only the long afternoonshadows or falling twilight would waken and spread my petals. No, Iwould return an aster or a witch-hazel bush, opening after the corn iscut, the crops gathered, and the yellow leaves begin to come sighing tothe 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 youthup. 

 "The 'sobbing wind, ' the 'weeping rain, '-- 'Tis 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 daisiesto laugh in October. A few late asters fringe the roadsides; anoccasional bee hums loudly in among them; but there is no sound oflaughter, and no shine of raindrops in the broken hoary seed-stalksthat strew the way. If the daisy-buds _laugh_, --as surely they do inJune, --why should not the wind sob and the rain weep--as surely theydo--in October? There are days of shadow with the days of sunshine;the seasons have their moods, as we have ours, and why should one beaccused of more sentiment than sense, and of bad rhetoric, too, inyielding to the spirit of the empty woods till the slow, slanting rainof October weeps, and the soughing wind comes sobbing through the trees?

Fall rain, fall steadily, heavily, drearily. Beat off the fadingleaves and flatten them into shapeless patterns on the soaking floor. Fall and slant and flatten, and, if you will, weep. Blow wind, throughthe creaking branches, blow about the whispering corners; parley thereoutside my window; whirl and drive the brown leaves into hiding, and ifI 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? Oneshould no more wish to escape from the sobering influence of theOctober days than from the joy of the June days, or the thrill in thewide 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"--

of course! And blessed is the man who finds winds that will wail withhim, and skies that love him enough to weep in sympathy. It saves hisfriends and next of kin a great deal of perfunctory weeping. 

There is no month in all the twelve as lovely and loved as October. Asingle, glorious June day is close to the full measure of our capacityfor joy; but the heart can hold a month of melancholy and still achefor 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 thingsseem past, that all the gold of gathered crops and glory on the woodedhillsides only gild and paint the shadow that sleeps within the verysunshine 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, thedawn with invisible choirs, the sunset with all the pageantry and pompof a regal fête. Now the day has lessened, and breaks tardily andwithout a dawn, and with a blend of shadow quickly fades into thenight. The warp of dusk runs through even its sunlit fabric fromdaybreak to dark. 

It is this shadow, this wash of haze upon the flaming landscape, thisscreen of mist through which the sunlight sifts, that veils the face ofthe 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 theoutward face of things. The very heart of the hills feels it. Thehush that fell with the first frost has hardly been broken. Theblackened grass, the blasted vine, have not grown green again. No newbuds are swelling, as after a late frost in spring. Instead, the oldleaves on the limbs rattle and waver down; the cornfield is only anarea of stubs and long lines of yellow shocks; and in the corners ofthe meadow fence stand clumps of flower-stalks, --joe-pye-weed, boneset, goldenrod, --bare and already bleaching; and deep within their mattedshade, where the brook bends about an elder bush, a single amberpendant of the jewel-weed, to which a bumble-bee comes droning on wingsso loud that a little hyla near us stops his pipe to listen!

There are other sounds, now that the shrill cry of the hyla isstilled--the cawing of crows beyond the wood, the scratching of abeetle in the crisp leaves, the cheep of a prying chickadee, the tinychirrup of a cricket in the grass--remnants of sounds from the summer, and echoes as of single strings left vibrating after the concert isover and the empty hall is closed. 

But how sweet is the silence! To be so far removed from sounds thatone can hear a single cricket and the creeping of a beetle in theleaves! Life allows so little margin of silence nowadays. One cannotsit down in quiet and listen to the small voices; one is obliged tostand up--in a telephone booth, a pitiful, two-by-two oasis of silencein life's desert of confusion and din. If October brought one nothingelse but this sweet refuge from noises it would be enough. For thesilence of October, with its peculiar qualities, is pure balm. Thereis none of the oppressive stillness that precedes a severe storm, noneof the ominous hush that falls before the first frost, none of thedeath-like lack of sound in a bleak snow-buried swamp or pasture, noneof the awesome majesty of quiet in the movement of the midnight stars, none of the fearful dumbness of the desert, that muteness without boundor break, eternal--none of these qualities in the sweet silence ofOctober. I have listened to all of these, and found them answering tomute tongues within my own soul, deep unto deep; but such moods arerare--moods that can meet death, that can sweep through the heavenswith the constellations, and that can hold converse with the dumb, stirless desert; whereas the need for the healing and restoration foundin 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 airon, and up, and far away till it is only soul. 

The joyous confusion and happy tumult of summer are gone; the matingand singing and fighting are over; the growing and working andwatch-care done; the running even of the sap has ceased; the grip ofthe 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 theafter-summer sun, and dreams. 

With empty hands in the same warm sun I lie and dream. The sounds ofsummer have died away; but the roar of coming winter has not yet brokenover the barriers of the north. Above my head stretches a fanlikebranch of witch-hazel, its yellow leaves falling, its tiny, twistedflowers just curling into bloom. The snow will fall before its yellowstraps have burned crisp and brown. But let it fall. It must meltagain; for as long as these pale embers glow the icy hands of wintershall slip and lose their hold on the outdoor world. 

And so I dream. The woods are at my back, the level meadow and widefields of corn-fodder stretch away in front of me to a flaming ridge ofoak and hickory. The sun is behind me over the woods, and the lazy airglances with every gauzy wing and flashing insect form that skims thesleepy meadow. But there is an unusual play of light over the grass, aglinting of threads that enmesh the air as if the slow-swinging windwere weaving gossamer of blown silk from the steeple-bush spindlesthrough 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 with its fore legs and kicking out backward with its hindlegs a tiny skein of web off into the air. The threads stream and swayand lengthen, gather and fill and billow, and tug at their anchoragetill, caught in the dip of some wayward current, they lift the littleaeronaut from his hangar and bear him away through the sky. 

Long before we dreamed of flight, this little voyager was coasting theclouds. I can follow him far across the meadow in the cobweb basket ashis filmy balloon floats shimmering over the meadow sea. 

Who taught him navigation? By what compass is he steering? And wherewill he come to port? Perhaps his anchor will catch in a hard-hack onthe other side of the pasture; or perhaps some wild air-current willsweep him over the woodtops, over the Blue Hills, and bear him ahundred miles away. No matter. The wind bloweth where it listeth, andthere is no port where the wind never blows. 

Yet no such ship would dare put to sea except in this soft and sunnyweather. The autumn seeds are sailing too--the pitching parachutes ofthistle and fall dandelion and wild lettuce, like fleets of tiny yachtsunder sail--a breeze from a cut-over ridge in the woods blowing almostcottony with the soft down of the tall lettuce that has come up thickin the clearing. 

As I watch the strowing of the winds, my melancholy slips away. Onecannot lie here in the warm but unquickening sun, and see this sowercrossing meadow and cornfield without a vision of waking life, offields again all green where now stands the fodder, of woods all fullof 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 andshoot, they pass the millstones of the robins' gizzards for the sake ofa chance to grow. They even lie in wait for me, plucking me by thecoat-sleeve, fastening upon my trousers' leg and holding on until Ihave walked with them into my very garden. The cows are forced tocarry them, the squirrel to hide them, the streams to whirl them ontheir foaming drift into places where no bird or squirrel or waywardbreeze would go. Not a corner within the horizon but will get itsneeded seed, not a nook anywhere, from the wind-swept fodder-field tothe deepest, darkest swamp, but will come to life and flower again withthe coming spring. 

The leaves are falling, the birds are leaving, most of them havingalready gone. Soon I shall hear the bugle notes of the last guard asthe Canada geese go over, headed swift and straight for the South. Andyonder stands the fodder, brown and dry, the slanting shocks securelytied against the beating rains. How can one be melancholy when oneknows the meaning of the fodder, when one is able to find in it hisfaith in the seasons, and see in it the beauty and the wisdom which hasbeen built into the round of the year?

To him who lacks this faith and understanding let me give a sereneOctober day in the woods. Go alone, lie down upon a bank where you canget a large view of earth and sky. "One seems to get nearer to naturein the early spring days, " says Mr. Burroughs. I think not, not if bynearer you mean closer to the heart and meaning of things. "Allscreens are removed, the earth everywhere speaks directly to you; sheis not hidden by verdure and foliage. " That is true; yet for most ofus her lips are still dumb with the silence of winter. One cannot comeclose to bare, cold earth. There is only one flat, faded expression onthe face of the fields in March; whereas in October there is a settledpeace and sweetness over all the face of Nature, a fullness and anon-withholding in her heart that makes communication natural andunderstanding 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 seemalmost 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 underthe mat of leaves. Troops of migrating warblers flit into and throughthe 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 foxgrapes is brought with a puff of wind from across the pasture; thesmell 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 veryessence, of life ripened and perfected and fit for storing till anotherharvest comes. And these flitting warblers, what are they but anothersign of promise, another proof of the wisdom which is at the heart ofthings? And all this glory of hickory and oak, of sumac and creeper, of burning berries on dogwood and ilex and elder--this sunset of theseasons--but the preparation for another dawn?

If one would be folded to the breast of Nature, if one would be pressedto her beating heart, if one would feel the mother in the soul ofthings, let these October days find him in the hills, or where theriver makes into some vast salt marsh, or underneath some ancient treewith fields of corn in shock and browning pasture slopes that reach andround themselves along the rim of the sky. 

The sun circles warm above me; and up against the snowy piles of clouda broad-winged hawk in lesser circles wheels and flings its piercingcry far down to me; a fat, dozy woodchuck sticks his head out and eyesme kindly from his burrow; and close over me, as if I too had grown andblossomed there, bends a rank, purple-flowered ironweed. We understandeach other; we are children of the same mother, nourished at the sameabundant breast, the weed and I, and the woodchuck, and the wheelinghawk, and the piled-up clouds, and the shouldering slopes against thesky--I am brother to them all. And this is home, this earth andsky--these fruitful fields, and wooded hills, and marshes of reed andriver flowing out to meet the sea. I can ask for no fairer home, nonelarger, none of more abundant or more golden corn. If aught iswanting, if just a tinge of shadow mingles with the rowan-scented haze, it is the early-falling twilight, the thought of my days, how shortthey are, how few of them find me with the freedom of these Octoberfields, and how soon they must fade into November. 

No, the thought of November does not disturb me. There is one glory ofthe sun and another glory of the moon, and another glory of the stars;for one star differeth from another star in glory. So also are themonths and seasons. And if I watch closely I shall see that not onlyare the birds leaving, but the muskrats are building their winterlodges, the frogs are bedding, the buds putting on their thick, furrycoats--life everywhere preparing for the cold. I need to take the sameprecaution, --even in my heart. I will take a day out of October, a daywhen the woods are aflame with color, when the winds are so slow thatthe spiders are ballooning, and lying where I can see them ascendingand the parachute seeds go drifting by, I will watch until my eyes areopened to see larger and plainer things go by--the days with the roundof labor until the evening; the seasons with their joyous waking, theireager living; their abundant fruiting, and then their sleeping--forthey must needs sleep. First the blade, then the ear, after that thefull corn in the ear, and after that the field of fodder. If so withthe corn and the seasons, why not so with life? And what of it allcould be fairer or more desirable than its October?--to lie and lookout over a sunlit meadow to a field of fodder cut and shocked againstthe winter with my own hands!

[Illustration: Going back to town]

XV

GOING BACK TO TOWN

"Labor Day, and school lunches begin to-morrow, " She said, carefullydrying one of the "Home Comforts" that had been growing dusty on anupper shelf since the middle of June. 

She set the three tin lunch-boxes (two for the four boys and one forme) 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 todispose of all that strawberry jam and currant jelly?"

"I am not tired of putting up lunches, " she answered. "I was justwondering if this year we ought not to go back to town. Four mileseach way for the boys to school, and twenty each way for you. Are n'twe paying a pretty high price for the hens and the pleasures of beingsnowed in?"

"An enormous price, " I affirmed solemnly. 

"And we 've paid it now these dozen winters running. Let's go intoBoston and take that suite of wedge-shaped rooms we looked at last fallin Hotel Huntington, at the intersection of the Avenue and the railroadtracks. The boys can count freight cars until they are exhausted, andwatch engines from their windows night and day. "

"It isn't a light matter, " she went on. "And we can't settle it bymaking it a joke. You need to be near your work; I need to be nearerhuman beings; the children need much more rest and freedom than theselong miles to school and these many chores allow them. "

"You 're entirely right, my dear, and this time we 'll do it. Our goodneighbor here will take the cow; I 'll give the cabbages away, and sendfor 'Honest Wash' Curtis to come for the hens. "

"But look at all this wild-grape jelly!" she exclaimed, turning to anarray of forty-four little garnet jars which she had just covered withhot paraffin against the coming winter. 

"And the thirteen bushels of potatoes, " I broke in. "And theapples--there are going to be eight or ten barrels of prime Baldwinsthis year. And--"

But it never comes to an end--it never has yet, for as soon as wedetermine to do it, we feel that we can or not, just as we please. Simply deciding that we will move in yields us such an instant andactual city sojourn that we seem already to have been and are nowgladly getting back to the country again. 

So here we have stayed summer and winter, knowing that we ought to goback nearer my work so that I can do more of it; and nearer the centerof social life so we can get more of it--life being pretty much lostthat is not spent in working, or going, or talking! Here we havestayed even through the winters, exempt from public benefits, blessingourselves, every time it snows on Saturday, that we are here and notthere for our week ends, here within the "tumultuous privacy" of thestorm and our own roaring fireplace, with our own apples and popcornand books and selves; and when it snows on Monday wishing the weatherwould always temper itself and time itself to the peculiar needs ofMullein Hill--its length of back country road and automobile. 

For an automobile is not a snow-plough, however much gasoline you giveit. Time was when I rode a snow-plough and enjoyed it, as my NeighborJonas rides and enjoys his, feeling that he is plenty fast enough, asindeed 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 speedinduced across one's diaphragm and over one's epidermis by theautomobile. 

Speeding is a disease of the hair follicles, I think, and the greathallucination of haste under which we move and try to have a being isseated in the muscles of the diaphragm. Have I not found myselfrushing for a hundred places by automobile that I never should havestarted for at all by hayrick or snow-plough, and thus had saved myselfthat time wholly? Space is Time's tail and we can't catch it. Themost we can catch, with the speediest car, is a sight of its tip goingaround the corner ahead. 

Speed is contagious, and I fear that I have it. I moved away here intoHingham to escape it, but life in the Hingham hills is not far enoughaway 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'tescape by hiding in Hingham--not entirely. And once the sporulatingspeed germs get into your system, it is as if Anopheles had bitten you, their multiplying and bursting into the blood occurring regularly, accompanied by a chill at two cylinders and followed by a fever forfour; a chill at four and a fever for six--eight--twelve, just likemalaria!

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 behindher. When she comes to harrow the garden, Jonas must needs come withher to say "Whoa!" all the way, and otherwise admonish and exhort herinto remembering that the cultivator is not a trotting-sulky, and thata row of beets is not a half-mile track. But the hard highways hurtBill's feet, so that Jonas nowadays takes every automobile's dust, andnone too sweetly either. 

"Jonas, " I said, as Bill was cooling off at the end of a row, "whydon't you get an automobile?"

"I take the eggs down to the store every two weeks and get a shave; butI don't need a car much, havin' Bill, " he replied, smashing a viciousgreenhead on Bill's withers that was keeping her mixed up with thetraces and the teeth of the harrow. "Besides, they 're skittish, nervous things compared with a hoss. What I 'd like is somethingneither 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 thinkit would beat Bill on the road. "

There was a cluck, a jump, and we were off down another row, with Jonassaying:--

"Not yet. Bill is still fast enough for me. "

And for me, too; yet there is no denying that conditions have changed, that a multitude of new ills have been introduced into the socialorganism by the automobile, and except in the deep drifts of winter, the Ford car comes nearer curing those ills than any other anti-toxinyet discovered. 

But here are the drifts still; and here is the old question of goingback to the city to escape them. I shall sometimes wish we had goneback as I start out on a snowy, blowy morning; but never at night as Iturn back--there is that difference between going to the city and goinghome. I often think the trip in is worth while for the sake of thetrip out, such joy is it to pull in from the black, soughing woods tothe cheer of the house, stamping the powdery snow off your boots andgreatcoat to the sweet din of welcomes that drown the howling of thewind outside. 

Once last winter I had to walk from the station. The snow was deep andfalling steadily when I left the house in the morning, with increasingwind and thickening storm all day, so that my afternoon train out wasdelayed and dropped me at the station long after dark. The roads wereblocked, the snow was knee-deep, the driving wind was horizontal, andthe whirling ice particles like sharp sand, stinging, blinding as Ibent to the road. 

I went forward leaning, the drag in my feet overcome by the pull of thelevel wind on my slant body. Once through the long stretch of woods Itried to cut across the fields. Here I lost my bearings, stumbled intoa ditch, and for a moment got utterly confused with the black of thenight, the bite of the cold, and the smothering hand of the wind on mymouth. 

Then I sat down where I was to pull myself together. There might bedanger in such a situation, but I was not really cold--not cool enough. I had been forcing the fight foolishly, head-on, by a frontal attackinstead of on the enemy's flank. 

Here in the meadow I was exposed to the full force of the sweepinggale, and here I realized for the first time that this was the greatstorm of the winter, one of the supreme passages of the year, and oneof 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 could have but one end. What must thewild polar night be like! What the will, the thrill of men like Scottand Peary who have fought these forces to a standstill at the verypoles! Their craft, their cunning, their daring, their imagination!The sway, the drive, the divine madness of such a purpose! A livingatom creeping across the ice-cap over the top of the world! A humanmote, so smothered in the Arctic dark and storm, so wide of the utmostshore of men, by a trail so far and filled and faint that only God canfollow!

It is not what a man does, but what he lives through doing it. Lifemay be safer, easier, longer, and fuller of possessions in one placethan another. But possessions do not measure life, nor years, norease, nor safety. Life in the Hingham hills in winter is wretchedlyremote at times, but nothing happens to me all day long in Boston to becompared for a moment with this experience here in the night and snow. I never feel the largeness of the sky there, nor the wideness of theworld, nor the loveliness of night, nor the fearful majesty of such awinter storm. 

As the far-flung lines swept down upon me and bore me back into thedrift, I knew somewhat the fierce delight of berg and floe and thatprimordial dark about the poles, and springing from my trench, I flungmyself single-handed and exultant against the double fronts of nightand storm, mightier than they, till weak, but victorious, I draggedmyself to the door of a neighboring farmhouse, the voice of the storm amighty song within my soul. 

This happened, as I say, _once_ last winter, and of course she said wesimply ought _not_ to live in such a place in winter; and of course, ifanything exactly like that should occur every winter night, I shouldhave to move into the city whether I liked city storms or not. One'slife is, to be sure, a consideration, but fortunately for life all thewinter days out here are not so magnificently ordered as this, exceptat dawn each morning, and at dusk, and at midnight when the skies areset with stars. 

But there is a largeness to the quality of country life, a freshnessand 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 thefirst frogs, when spring and winter meet; or that day in the fall--theday of the first frost, when autumn and winter meet; or that day inAugust--the day of the full-blown goldenrod, when summer and autumnmeet--_these_, together with the days of June, and more especially thatparticular day in June when you can't tell earth from heaven, wheneverything is life and love and song, and the very turtles of the pondare moved from their lily-pads to wander the upland slopes to lay--theday when spring and summer meet!

Or if these seem rare days, try again anywhere in the calendar from therainy day in February when the thaw begins to Indian summer and the dayof floating thistledown, and the cruising fleets of wild lettuce andsilky-sailed fireweed on the golden air. The big soft clouds aresailing their wider sea; the sweet sunshine, the lesser winds, thechickadees and kinglets linger with you in your sheltered hollowagainst the hill--you and they for yet a little slumber, a little sleepbefore there breaks upon you the wrath of the North. 

But is this sweet, slumberous, half-melancholy day any nearer perfectthan that day when

 "Announced by all the trumpets of the sky Arrives the snow"--

or the blizzard?

But going back to town, as she intimated, concerns the children quiteas much as me. They travel eight miles a day to get to school, part ofit on foot and part of it by street car--and were absent one day lastyear when the telephone wires were down and we thought there would beno school because of the snow. They might not have missed that one dayhad we been in the city, and I must think of that when it comes time togo back. There is room for them in the city to improve in spelling andpenmanship too, vastly to improve. But they could n't have half somuch fun there as here, nor half so many things to do, simple, healthful, homely, interesting things to do, as good for them as booksand food and sleep--these last things to be had here, too, in greatabundance. 

What could take the place of the cow and hens in the city? The hensare Mansie's (he is the oldest) and the cow is mine. But night afternight last winter I would climb the Hill to see the barn lighted, andin the shadowy stall two little human figures--one squat on an upturnedbucket milking, his milk-pail, too large to be held between his knees, lodged perilously under the cow upon a half-peck measure; the otherlittle human figure quietly holding the cow's tail. 

No head is turned; not a squeeze is missed--this is _business_ here inthe 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 oldcow's flank. "You go right in, we 'll be there. She has n't kickedbut once!"

Perhaps that is n't a good thing for those two little boys todo--watering, feeding, brushing, milking the cow on a winter night inorder to save me--and loving to! Perhaps that is n't a good thing forme 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 boysmilking, who are liable to fall into the pail. 

Meantime the two middlers had shoveled out the road down to themail-box on the street so that I ran up on bare earth, the very wheelsof the car conscious of the love behind the shovels, of the speed andenergy it took to get the long job done before I should arrive. 

"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, seizingthe bag of bananas. 

"Oh, we sailed up--took that curve like a bird--didn't needchains--just like a boulevard right into the barn!"

"It's a fearful night out, is n't it?" she says, taking both of myhands in hers, a touch of awe, a note of thankfulness in her voice. 

"Bad night in Boston!" I exclaim. "Trains late, cars stalled--streetsblocked 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 pailof 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 whistlesoutside, the snow sweeps up against the windows, --the night growswilder and fiercer. 

"Why doesn't Mansie come?" his mother asks, looking at me. 

"Oh, he can't shut the hen-house doors, for the snow. He 'll be herein 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 comesblinking into the lighted dining-room, his hair dusty with snow, hischeeks blazing, his eyes afire. He slips into his place with just ahint 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 outthere in the trees a night like this. What were you doing?"

"Shutting up the chickens. "

"But you did shut them up early in the afternoon. "

"Yes, mother. "

"Well?"

"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 bighens--a little one and a big one, a little one and a big one, to keepthe little ones warm; and it took a lot of time. "

"Will you have another cup of warm milk?" she asks, pouring him morefrom the pitcher, doing very well with her lips and eyes, it seemed tome, considering how she ran the cup over. 

Shall I take them back to the city for the winter--away from theirchickens, and cow and dog and pig and work-bench and haymow andfireside, and the open air and their wild neighbors and the wildernights that I remember as a child?

 "There it 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. "

Once they have known all of this I can take them into town and notspoil the poet in them. 

"Make our boy interested in natural history if you can. It is betterthan games. Keep him in the open air. Above all, you must guard himagainst indolence. Make him a strenuous man. The great God has calledme. Take comfort in that I die in peace with the world and myself andnot afraid"--from the last letter of Captain Scott to his wife, as helay watching the approach of death in the Antarctic cold. His own endwas nigh, but the infant son, in whose life he should never take afather's part, what should be his last word for him?

"Make our boy interested in natural history if you can. It is betterthan games. Keep him in the open air. "

Those are solemn words, and they carry a message of deep significance. I have watched my own boys; I recall my own boyhood; and I believe thewords are true. So thoroughly do I believe in the physical and moralvalue of the outdoors for children, the open fields and woods, thatbefore my children were all born I brought them here into the country. Here they shall grow as the weeds and flowers grow, and in the samefields with them; here they shall play as the young foxes andwoodchucks play, and on the same bushy hillsides with them--summer andwinter. 

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 childrenshould have, and may have, other and better things to do than puppiesand kittens can do; for they are not going to grow up into dogs andcats. 

Once awaken a love for the woods in the heart of a child, and somethinghas passed into him that the evil days, when they come, shall have toreckon with. Let me take my children into the country to live, if Ican. Or if I cannot, then let me take them on holidays, or, if it mustbe, on Sunday mornings with me, for a tramp. 

I bless those Sunday-morning tramps to the Tumbling Dam Woods, toSheppard's Mills, to Cubby Hollow, to Cohansey Creek Meadows, that Iwas taken upon as a lad of twelve. We would start out early, and deepin the woods, or by some pond or stream, or out upon the wide meadows, we would wait, and watch the ways of wild things--the little marshwrens bubbling in the calamus and cattails, the young minks at play, the big pond turtles on their sunning logs--these and more, a multitudemore. Here we would eat our crackers and the wild berries or buds thatwe could find, and with the sunset turn back toward home. 

We saw this and that, single deep impressions, that I shall alwaysremember. But better than any single sight, any sweet sound or smell, was the sense of companionship with my human guide, and the sense thatI 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 boyswish to go. 

[Illustration: The Christmas tree]

XVI

THE CHRISTMAS TREE

We shall not go back to town before Christmas, any way. They have abig Christmas tree on the Common, but the boys declare they had ratherhave their own Christmas tree, no matter how small; rather go into thewoods and mark it weeks ahead, as we always do, and then go bring ithome the day before, than to look at the tallest spruce that the Mayorcould fetch out of the forests of Maine and set up on the Common. Where do such simple-minded children live, and in such primitiveconditions that they can carry an axe into the woods these days and cuttheir own Christmas tree? Here on the Hills of Hingham, almost twentymiles from Boston. 

I hope it snows this Christmas as it did last. How it snowed! All daywe waited a lull in the gale, for our tree was still uncut, still outin the Shanty-Field Woods. But all day long it blew, and all day longthe dry drifts swirled and eddied into the deep hollows and piledthemselves across the ridge road into bluffs and headlands that had tobe cut and tunneled through. As the afternoon wore on, the stormsteadied. The wind came gloriously through the tall woods, driving themingled snow and shadow till the field and the very barn were blottedout. 

"We _must_ go!" was the cry. "We'll have no Christmas tree!"

"But this is impossible. We could never carry it home through allthis, even if we could find it. "

"But we 've marked it!"

"You mean you have devoted it, hallowed it, you little Aztecs! Do youthink the tree will mind?"

"Why--yes. Wouldn't you mind, father, if you were a tree and markedfor Christmas and nobody came for you?"

"Perhaps I would--yes, I think you 're right. It is too bad. But we'll have to wait. "

We waited and waited, and for once they went to bed on Christmas Evewith their tree uncut. They had hardly gone, however, when I took theaxe and the lantern (for safety) and started up the ridge for thedevoted tree. I found it; got it on my shoulder; and long after nineo'clock--as snowy and as weary an old Chris as ever descended achimney--came dragging in the tree. 

We got to bed late that night--as all parents ought on the night beforeChristmas; but Old Chris himself, soundest of sleepers, never sleptsounder! And what a Christmas Day we had. What a tree it was! Whogot it? How? No, old Chris did n't bring it--not when two of the boyscame floundering in from a walk that afternoon saying they had trackedme from the cellar door clear out to the tree-stump--where they foundmy axe!

I hope it snows. Christmas ought to have snow; as it ought to haveholly and candles and stockings and mistletoe and a tree. I wonder ifEngland will send us mistletoe this year? Perhaps we shall have to useour home-grown; but then, mistletoe is mistletoe, and one is n't askingone's self what kind of mistletoe hangs overhead when one chances toget under the chandelier. They tell me there are going to be no toysthis year, none of old Chris's kind but only weird, fierce, Fourth-of-July things from Japan. "Christmas comes but once a year, "my elders used to say to me--a strange, hard saying; yet not so strangeand hard as the feeling that somehow, this year, Christmas may not comeat all. I never felt that way before. It will never do; and I shallhang up my stocking. Of course they will have a tree at church for thechildren, as they did last year, but will the choir sing this year, "While shepherds watched their flock by night" and "Hark! the heraldangels sing"?

I have grown suddenly old. The child that used to be in me is with theghost of Christmas Past, and I am partner now with Scrooge, taking oldMarley's place. The choir may sing; but--

 "The lonely mountains o'er And the resounding shore A voice of weeping heard and loud lament!"

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 wasa child?--since last Christmas, when I still believed in Christmas, andsang with the choir, "Noel! Noel!"?

But I am confusing sentiment and faith. If I cannot sing peace onearth, I still believe in it; if I cannot hear the angels, I know thatthe Christ was born, and that Christmas is coming. It will not be avery 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 awindow, bright with candles a year ago, will be darkened. There willbe no goose at the Cratchits', for both Bob and Master Cratchit havegone to the front. But Tiny Tim is left, and the Christ Child is left, and my child is left, and yours--even your dear dreamchild "upon thetedious shores of Lethe" that always comes back at Christmas. It takesonly one little child to make Christmas--one little child, and theangels who companion him, and the shepherds who come to see him, andthe Wise Men who worship him and bring him gifts. 

We can have Christmas, for unto us again, as truly as in Bethlehem ofJudea, a child is born on whose shoulders shall be the government andwhose name is the Prince of Peace. 

Christ is reborn with every child, and Christmas is his festival. Come, let us keep it for his sake; for the children's sake; for thesake of the little child that we must become before we can enter intothe Kingdom of Heaven. It is neither kings nor kaisers, but a littlechild that shall lead us finally. And long after the round-lippedcannons have ceased to roar, we shall hear the Christmas song of theAngels. 

 "But see! the Virgin blest Hath laid her Babe to rest--"

Come, softly, swiftly, dress up the tree, hang high the largeststockings; bring out the toys--softly!

I hope it snows. 

THE END