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Title: The Hills of Hingham

Author: Dallas Lore Sharp

Release Date: June 23, 2006 [EBook #18664]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

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Produced by Al Haines











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 can
say the same of its author for that matter.  I had intended this book
to set forth some features of the Earth that make it to be preferred to
Heaven as a place of present abode, and to note in detail the peculiar
attractions of Hingham over Boston, say,--Boston being quite the best
city on the Earth to live in.  I had the book started under the title
"And this Our Life"

  . . . exempt from public haunt,
  Finds tongues in trees,"

--when, suddenly, war broke out, the gates of Hell swung wide open into
Belgium, and Heaven began to seem the better place.  Meanwhile, a
series of lesser local troubles had been brewing--drouth, caterpillars,
rheumatism, increased commutation rates, more college themes,--more
than I could carry back and forth to Hingham,--so that as the writing
went on Boston began to seem, not a better place than Hingham, but a
nearer place, somehow, and more thoroughly sprayed.

And all this time the book on Life that I thought I was writing was
growing chapter by chapter into a defense of that book--a defense of
Life--my life here by my fireside with my boys and Her, and the garden
and woodlot and hens and bees, and days off and evenings at home and
books to read, yes, and books to write--all of which I had taken for
granted at twenty, and believed in with a beautiful faith at thirty,
when I moved out here into what was then an uninfected forest.

That was the time to have written the book that I had intended this one
to be--while the adventure in contentment was still an adventure, while
the lure of the land was of fourteen acres yet unexplored, while back
to the soil meant exactly what the seed catalogues picture it, and my
summer in a garden had not yet passed into its frosty fall.  Instead, I
have done what no writer ought to do, what none ever did before, unless
Jacob wrote,--taken a fourteen-year-old enthusiasm for my theme, to
find the enthusiasm grown, as Rachel must have grown by the time Jacob
got her, into a philosophy, and like all philosophies, in need of
defense.

What men live by is an interesting speculative question, but what men
live on, and where they can live,--with children to bring up, and their
own souls to save,--is an intensely practical question which I have
been 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 Hill
and Peartree Hill and Turkey Hill, and Otis and Planter's and Prospect
Hills, Hingham being more noted for its harbor and plains.  Everybody
has heard of Hingham smelts.  Mullein Hill is in Hingham, too, but
Mullein Hill is only a wrinkle on the face of Liberty Plain, which
accounts partly for our having it.  Almost anybody can have a hill in
Hingham who is content without elevation, a surveyor's term as applied
to hills, and a purely accidental property which is not at all
essential to real hillness, or the sense of height.  We have a stump on
Mullein Hill for height.  A hill in Hingham is not only possible, but
even practical as compared with a Forest in Arden, Arden being
altogether too far from town; besides

  ". . . there's no clock in the forest"

and we have the 8.35 train to catch of a winter morning!


  "A sheep-cote fenced about with olive trees"

sounds more pastoral than apple trees around a house on a hill in
Hingham, and it would be more ideal, too, if New England weather were
not so much better adapted to apples, and if one did not prefer apples,
and if one could raise a family in a sheep-cote.

We started in the sheep-cote, back yonder when all the world was twenty
or thereabouts, and when every wild-cherry-bush was an olive tree.  But
one day the tent caterpillar like a wolf swept down on our fold of
cherry-bushes and we fled Arden, never to get back.  We lived for a
time in town and bought olives in bottles, stuffed ones sometimes, then
we got a hill in Hingham, just this side of Arden, still buying our
olives, but not our apples now, nor our peaches, nor our musk melons,
nor our wood for the open fire.  We buy commutation tickets, and pay
dearly for the trips back and forth.  But we could n't make a living in
Arden.  Our hill in Hingham is a compromise.

Only folk of twenty and close to twenty live in Arden.  We are forty
now and no longer poets.  When we are really old and our grasshoppers
become a burden, we may go back to town where the insects are an
entirely different species; but for this exceedingly busy present,
between our fading dawn of visions and our coming dusk of dreams, a
hill in Hingham, though a compromise, is an almost strategic position,
Hingham being more or less of an escape from Boston, and the hill,
though not in the Forest of Arden, something of an escape from Hingham,
a quaint old village of elm-cooled streets and gentle neighbors.  Not
that we hate Boston, nor that we pass by on the other side in Hingham.
We gladly pick our neighbors up and set them in our motor car and bring
them to the foot of the hill.  We people of the hills do not hate
either crowds or neighbors.  We are neighbors ourselves and parts of
the city crowds too; and we love to bind up wounds and bring folk to
their inns.  But we cannot take them farther, for there are no inns out
here.  We leave them in Hingham and journey on alone into a region
where neither thief nor anyone infests the roadsides; where there are
no roads in fact, but only driftways and footpaths through the sparsely
settled hills.

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

Not for apples nor wood fires have we a hill in Hingham; not for hens
and a bigger house, and leisure, and conveniences, and excitements; not
for ways to earn a living, nor for ways to spend it.  Stay in town for
that.  There "you can even walk alone without being bored.  No long,
uneventful stretches of bleak, wintry landscape, where nothing moves,
not even the train of thought.  No benumbed and self-centered trees
holding out pathetic frozen branches for sympathy.  Impossible to be
introspective here.  Fall into a brown or blue study and you are likely
to be run over.  Thought is brought to the surface by mental massage.
No time to dwell upon your beloved self.  So many more interesting
things to think about.  And the changing scenes unfold more rapidly
than a moving-picture reel."

This sounds much more interesting than the country.  And it is more
interesting, Broadway asking nothing of a country lane for excitement.
And back they go who live on excitement; while some of us take this
same excitement as the best of reasons for double windows and storm
doors and country life the year through.

You can think in the city, but it is in spite of the city.
Gregariousness and individuality do not abide together; nor is external
excitement the cause or the concomitant of thought.  In fact this
"mental massage" of the city is to real thinking about what a
mustard-plaster is to circulation--a counter-irritant.  The thinker is
one who finds himself (quite impossible on Broadway!); and then finds
himself _interesting_--more interesting than Broadway--another
impossibility within the city limits.  Only in the country can he do
that, in a wide and negative environment of quiet, room, and
isolation--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 in
libraries.  It is against the wide, drab background of the country that
thought most naturally reacts, thinking being only the excitement of a
man discovering himself, as he is compelled to do, where bending
horizon and arching sky shift as he shifts in all creation's constant
endeavor to swing around and center on him.  Nothing centers on him in
the city, where he thinks by "mental massage"--through the scalp with
laying on of hands, as by benediction or shampoo.

But for the busy man, say of forty, are the hills of Hingham with their
adventure possible?  Why, there is nothing ailing the man of forty
except that he now is neither young nor old, nor rich, the chances are;
nor a dead failure either, but just an average man; yet he is one of
God's people, if the Philistines were (He brought them from Caphtor)
and the Syrians (those He brought from Kir).  The man of forty has a
right to so much of the Promised Land as a hill in Hingham.  But he is
afraid to possess it because it is so far from work and friends and
lighted streets.  He is afraid of the dark and of going off to sit down
upon a stump for converse with himself.  He is afraid he won't get his
work done.  If his work were planting beans, he would get none planted
surely while on the stump; but so he might be saved the ungracious task
of giving away his surplus beans to bean-ridden friends for the summer.
A man, I believe, can plant too many beans.  He might not finish the
freshman themes either.  But when was the last freshman theme ever
done?  Finish them if he can, he has only baked the freshmen into
sophomores, and so emptied the ovens for another batch of dough.  He
shall never put a crust on the last freshman, and not much of a crust
on the last sophomore either, the Almighty refusing to cooeperate with
him in the baking.  Let him do the best he can, not the most he can,
and quit for Hingham and the hills where he can go out to a stump and
sit down.

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

According to the deed my hill comprises "fourteen acres more or less"
of an ancient glacier, a fourteen-acre heap of unmitigated gravel,
which now these almost fourteen years I have been trying to clear of
stones, picking, picking for a whole Stone Age, and planning daily to
buy the nine-acre ridge adjoining me which is gravelier than mine.  By
actual count we dumped five hundred cartloads of stones into the
foundation of a porch when making over the house recently--and still I
am 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 than
these I now have, nine times worse for stones!

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

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

Nothing is more difficult to find anywhere than time to sit down with
yourself, except the ability to enjoy the time after finding it,--even
here on a hill in Hingham, if the hill is in woods.  There are foes to
face in the city and floods to stem out here, but let no one try to
fight several acres of caterpillars.  When you see them coming, climb
your stump and wait on the Lord.  He is slow; and the caterpillars are
horribly fast.  True.  Yet I say.  To your stump and wait--and learn
how restful a thing it is to sit down by faith.  For the town sprayer
is a vain thing.  The roof of green is riddled.  The rafters overhead
reach out as naked as in December.  Ruin looks through.  On sweep the
devouring hosts in spite of arsenate of lead and "wilt" disease and
Calasoma beetles.  Nothing will avail; nothing but a new woodlot
planted with saplings that the caterpillars do not eat.  Sit still my
soul, and know that when these oak trees fall there will come up the
fir tree and the pine tree and the shagbark, distasteful to the worms;
and they shall be to the Lord for a name, for an everlasting sign that
shall not be cut off.

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

But how hard to follow!  I would so like to help the Lord.  Not to do
my own share only; but to shoulder the Almighty's too, saying--

  "If it were done when 't is done, then 't were well
  It were done quickly";

and I up and do it.  But it does not stay done.  I had sprayed,
creosoted, cut, trimmed, cemented, only to see the trees die, until I
was forced to rest upon the stump, when I saw what I had been blind to
before: that the pine trees were tipped with cones, and that there in
the tops were the red squirrels shucking and giving the winged seeds to
the winds to sow; and that even now up the wooded slope below me, where
the first of the old oaks had perished, was climbing a future grove of
seedling pines.

The forests of Arden are not infested with gypsy moths, nor the woods
of Heaven either, I suppose; but the trees in the hills of Hingham are.
And yet they are the trees of the Lord; the moths are his also, and the
caring for them.  I am caring for a few college freshmen and my soul.
I shall go forth to my work until the evening.  The Lord can take the
night-shift; for it was He who instituted the twilight, and it is He
who must needs be responsible till the morning.

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

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

From running the universe at thirty the man of forty finds himself
running with it, paced before, behind, and beside, by other runners and
by the very stars in their courses.  He has struck the universal gait,
a strong steady stride that will carry him to the finish, but not among
the medals.  This is an evil thing.  Forty is a dangerous age.  The
wild race of twenty, the staggering step of eighty, are full of peril,
but not so deadly as the even, mechanical going of forty; for youth has
the dash in hand; old age has ceased to worry and is walking in; while
the man of forty is right in the middle of the run, grinding along on
his second wind with the cheering all ahead of him.

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

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

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

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

Perhaps I have never seen life whole; I may need a throne and not a
hill and a stump for that; but here in the wideness of the open skies,
in the sweet quiet, in the hush that often fills these deep woods, I
sometimes see life free, not free from men and things, but
unencumbered, coming to meet me out of the morning and passing on with
me toward the sunset until, at times, the stepping westward, the
uneventful onwardness of life has

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

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, or
your acres of stones, or your woods of worms, worms that may destroy
your trees though you spray, is to steady and establish your soul, and
vastly to comfort it!

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

This is bed-rock fact, the broad and solid bottom for a cheerful
philosophy.  To know that they can get on without you (more knowledge
than many ever attain!) is the beginning of wisdom; and to learn that
you can get on without them--at the close of the day, and out here on
your hill in Hingham--this is the end of understanding.

If I am no more than the shoes I stitch, or the lessons I peg, and the
college can so calmly move on without me, how small I am!  Let me hope
that I am useful there, and useful as a citizen-at-large; but I know
that I am chiefly and utterly dispensable at large, everywhere at
large, even in Hingham.  But not here on my hilltop.  Here I am
indispensable.  In the short shift from my classroom, from chair to
hill, from doing to being, I pass from a means into an end, from a part
in the scheme of things to the scheme of things itself.

Here stands my hill on the highway from dawn to dusk, and just where
the bending walls of the sky center and encircle it.  This is not only
a large place, with room and verge enough; it is also a chief place,
where start the north and south and east and west, and the gray crooked
road over which I travel daily.

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

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

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

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

If it is not also a steadied thinking and a cleared seeing, it is at
least a mental and moral convalescence that one gets--out of the
landscape, out of its largeness, sweetness and reality.  I am quickly
conscious on the hills of space all about me--room for myself, room for
the things that crowd and clutter me; and as these arrange and set
themselves in order, I am aware of space within me, of freedom and
wideness there, of things in order, of doors unlocked and windows
opened, through which I look out upon a new young world, new like the
morning, young like the seedling pines on the slope--young and new like
my soul!

Now I can go back to my classroom.  Now I can read themes once more.
Now I can gaze into the round, moon-eyed face of youth and have
faith--as if my chair were a stump, my classroom a wooded hillside
covered with young pines, seedlings of the Lord, and full of sap, and
proof against the worm.

Yet these are the same youth who yesterday wrote the "Autobiography of
a Fountain Pen" and "The Exhilarations of the Straw-Ride" and the
essays on "The Beauties of Nature."  It is I who am not the same.  I
have been changed, renewed, having seen from my stump the face of
eternal youth in the freshmen pines marching up the hillside, in the
young brook playing and pursuing through the meadow, in the young winds
over the trees, the young stars in the skies, the young moon riding
along the horizon

  "With the auld moon in her arm"--

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

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

From the stump in the woodlot I see not only the face of things but the
course of things, that they are moving past me, over me, and round and
round me their fixed center--for the horizon to bend about, for the sky
to arch over, for the highways to start from, for every influence and
interest between Hingham and Heaven to focus on.

  "All things journey sun and moon
  Morning noon and afternoon,
  Night and all her stars,"--

and they all journey about me on my stump in the hilltop.

We love human nature; we love to get back to it in New York and
Boston,--for a day, for six months in the winter even,--but we need to
get back to the hills at night.  We are a conventional, gregarious,
herding folk.  Let an American get rich and he builds a grand house in
the city.  Let an Englishman get rich and he moves straight into the
country--out to such a spot as Bradley Hill in Hingham.

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

No matter how centered and serene I start from Hingham, a little way
into Boston and I am lost.  First I begin to hurry (a thing unnecessary
in Hingham) for everybody else is hurrying; then I must get somewhere;
everybody else is getting somewhere, getting everywhere.  For see them
in front of me and behind me, getting there ahead of me and coming
after me to leave no room for me when I shall arrive!  But when shall I
and where shall I arrive?  And what shall I arrive for?  And who am I
that I would arrive?  I look around for the encircling horizon, and up
for the overarching sky, and in for the guiding purpose; but instead of
a purpose I am hustled forward by a crowd, and at the bottom of a
street far down beneath such overhanging walls as leave me but a slit
of smoky sky.  I am in the hands of a force mightier than I, in the
hands of the police force at the street corners, and am carried across
to the opposite curb through a breaker that rolls in front of me again
at the next crossing.  So I move on, by external compulsion, knowing,
as I move, by a kind of mental contagion, feeling by a sort of proxy,
and putting my trust everywhere in advertising and the police.

Thus I come, it may be, into the Public Library, "where is all the
recorded wit of the world, but none of the recording,"--where
Shakespeare and Old Sleuth and Pansy look all alike and as readable as
the card catalogues, or the boy attendants, or the signs of the Zodiac
in the 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 vast
sepulcher of human thought!

I move among them dully, the stir of the streets coming to me as the
soughing of wind on the desert or the wash of waves on a distant shore.
Here I find a book of my own among the dead.  I read its inscription
curiously.  I must have written it--when I was alive aeons ago, and far
from here.  But why did I?  For see the unread, the shelved, the
numbered, the buried books!

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

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

And how sweet--how fat and alive and friendly the old colored hack
driver, standing there by the stone post!  He has a number on his cap;
he is catalogued somewhere, but not in the library.  Thank heaven he is
no book, but just a good black human being.  I rush up and shake hands
with him.  He nearly falls into his cab with astonishment; but I must
get hold of life 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 thing
once more with face toward--the hills of Hingham.

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

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

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

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

And now I near the hill: these are my woods; this is my gravel bank;
that my meadow, my wall, my postbox, and up yonder among the trees
shines my light.  They are expecting me, She, and the boys, and the
dog, and the blazing fire, the very trees up there, and the watching
stars.

How the car takes the hill--as if up were down, and wheels were wings,
and just as if the boys and the dog and the dinner and the fire were
all waiting for _it_!  As they are, of course, it and me.  I open up
the throttle, I jam the shrieking whistle, and rip around the bend in
the middle of the hill,--puppy yelping down to meet me.  The noise we
make as the lights flash on, as the big door rolls back, and we come to
our nightly standstill inside the boy-filled barn!  They drag me from
the wheel--puppy yanking at my trouser leg; they pounce upon my
bundles; they hustle me toward the house, where, in the lighted doorway
more welcome waits me--and questions, batteries of them, even puppy
joining the attack!

Who would have believed I had seen and done all this,--had any such
adventurous trip,--lived any such significant day,--catching my regular
8.35 train as I did!

But we get through the dinner and some of the talk and then the
out-loud reading before the fire; then while she is tucking the
children in bed, I go out to see that all is well about the barn.

How the night has deepened since my return!  No wind stirs.  The
hill-crest blazes with the light of the stars.  Such an earth and sky!
I lock the barn, and crossing the field, climb the ridge to the stump.
The bare woods are dark with shadow and deep with the silence of the
night.  A train rumbles somewhere in the distance, then the silence and
space reach off through the shadows, infinitely far off down the
hillside; 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 ghostly
shapes pass by, ghostly faces press against the window, and at the
corners of the house ghostly voices pause for parley, muttering thickly
through the swirl and smother of the snow.  Inside burns the fire,
kindling into glorious pink and white peonies on the nearest wall and
glowing warm and sweet on her face as she reads.  The children are in
bed.  She is reading aloud to me:

"'I wish the good old times would come again,' she said, 'when we were
not quite so rich.  I do not mean that I want to be poor, but there was
a middle state'--so she was pleased to ramble on--'in which, I am sure,
we were a great deal happier.'"

Her eyes left the familiar page, wandering far away beyond the fire.

"Is it so hard to bear up under two thousand five hundred a year?" I
asked.

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

"You forget again that we had n't even one of our four boys."

Her gaze rested tenderly upon the little chairs between her and the
fire, just where the boys had left them at the end of their listening
an hour before.

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

"We should like to be?" I questioned.

"'A purchase'"--she was reading again--"'is but a purchase, now that
you have money enough and to spare.  Formerly it used to be a triumph.
Do you not remember the brown suit, which you made to hang upon you,
till all your friends cried shame upon you, it grew so threadbare--and
all because of that folio Beaumont and Fletcher which you dragged home
late at night from Barker's in Covent Garden?  Do you remember how we
eyed it for weeks before we could make up our minds to the purchase,
and had not come to a determination till it was near ten o'clock of the
Saturday night, when you set off from Islington, fearing--'

"Is n't this exactly our case?" she asked, interrupting herself for no
other purpose than to prolong the passage she was reading.

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

I watched for the effect of the shot, but evidently I had not got the
range, 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 out
the relic from his dusty treasures--and when you lugged it home,
wishing it were twice as cumbersome--'"

She had paused again.  To know when to pause! how to make the most of
your author! to draw out the linked sweetness of a passage to its
longest--there reads your loving reader!

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

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

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

I have a weakness for out-loud reading and Lamb, and a peculiar joy in
wood fires when the nights are dark and snowy.  My mind is not, after
all, _much_ set on automobiles then; there is such a difference between
a wild January night on Mullein Hill and an automobile show--or any
other show.  If St. Bernard of Cluny had been an American and not a
monk, I think Jerusalem the Golden might very likely have been a quiet
little town like Hingham, all black with a winter night and lighted for
the Saint with a single open fire.  Anyhow I cannot imagine the
mansions of the Celestial City without fireplaces.  I don't know how
the equatorial people do; I have never lived on the equator, and I have
no desire to--nor in any other place where it is too hot for a
fireplace, or where wood is so scarce that one is obliged to substitute
a gas-log.  I wish I could build an open hearth into every lowly home
and give every man who loves out-loud reading a copy of Lamb and sticks
enough for a fire.  I wish--is it futile to wish that besides the
fireplace and the sticks I might add a great many more winter evenings
to the round of the year?  I would leave the days as they are in their
beautiful and endless variety, but the long, shut-in winter evenings

  "When young and old in circle
  About the firebrands close--"

these I would multiply, taking them away from June to give to January,
could I supply the fire and the boys and the books and the reader to go
with them.

And I often wonder if more men might not supply these things for
themselves?  There are January nights for all, and space enough outside
of city and suburb for simple firesides; books enough also; yes, and
readers-aloud if they are given the chance.  But the boys are hard to
get.  They might even come girls.  Well, what is the difference,
anyway?  Suppose mine had been dear things with ribbons in their
hair--not these four, but four more?  Then all the glowing circle about
the fireplace had been filled, the chain complete, a link of fine gold
for every link of steel!  Ah! the cat hath nine lives, as Phisologus
saith; but a man hath as many lives as he hath sons, with two lives
besides for every daughter.  So it must always seem to me when I
remember the precious thing that vanished from me before I could even
lay her in her mother's arms.  She would have been, I think, a full
head taller than the oldest boy, and wiser than all four of the boys,
being a girl.

The real needs of life are few, and to be had by most men, even though
they include children and an automobile.  Second-hand cars are very
cheap, and the world seems full of orphans--how many orphans now!  It
is n't a question of getting the things; the question is, What are the
necessary things?

First, I say, a fireplace.  A man does well to build his fireplace
first instead of the garage.  Better than a roof over one's head is a
fire at one's feet; for what is there deadlier than the chill of a
fireless house?  The fireplace first, unless 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 of
old tongs.  I was a lad in my teens.  "Five--five--five--five--v-v-v-ve
_will_ you make it ten?" I heard the auctioneer cry as I passed the
front gate.  He held a pair of brass-headed hearth tongs above his
head, waving them wildly at the unresponsive bidders.

"Will _you_ make it ten?" he yelled at me as the last comer.

"Ten," I answered, a need for fire tongs, that blistering July day,
suddenly overcoming me.

"And sold for ten cents to the boy in the gate," shouted the
auctioneer.  "Will somebody throw in the fireplace to go with them!"

I took my tongs rather sheepishly, I fear, rather helplessly, and got
back through the gate, for I was on foot and several miles from home.
I trudged on for home carrying those tongs with me all the way, not
knowing why, not wishing to throw them into the briers for they were
very old and full of story, and I--was very young and full of--I cannot
tell, remembering what little _boys_ are made of.  And now here they
lean against the hearth, that very pair.  I packed them in the bottom
of my trunk when I started for college; I saved them through the years
when our open fire was a "base-burner," and then a gas-radiator in a
city flat.  Moved, preserved, "married" these many years, they stand at
last where the boy must have dreamed them standing--that hot July day,
how long, long ago!

But why should a boy have dreamed such dreams?  And what was it in a
married old pair of brass-headed hearth tongs that a boy in his teens
should have bought them at auction and then have carried them to
college with him, rattling about on the bottom of his trunk?  For it
was not an over-packed trunk.  There were the tongs on the bottom and a
thirty-cent edition of "The Natural History of Selborne" on the
top--that is all.  That is all the boy remembers.  These two things, at
least, are all that now remain out of the trunkful he started with from
home--the tongs for sentiment, and for friendship the book.

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

"Yes, I 'm listening."

"And dreaming?"

"Yes, dreaming a little, too,--of you, dear, and the tongs there, and
the boys upstairs, and the storm outside, and the fire, and of this
sweet room,--an old, old dream that I had years and years ago,--all
come true, and more than true."

She slipped her hand into mine.

"Shall I go on?"

"Yes, go on, please, and I will listen--and, if you don't mind, dream a
little, too, perhaps."

There is something in the fire and the rise and fall of her voice,
something so infinitely soothing in its tones, and in Lamb, and in such
a night as this--so vast and fearful, but so futile in its bitter sweep
about the fire--that while one 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 the
icechest does not lack its clear blue cake of frozen February.  We
gather our own ice as we gather our own hay and apples.  The small
ice-house under the trees has just been packed with eighteen tons of
"black" ice, sawed and split into even blocks, tier on tier, the
harvest of the curing cold, as loft and cellar are still filled with
crops made in the summer's curing heat.  So do the seasons overlap and
run together!  So do they complement and multiply each other!  Like the
star-dust of Saturn they belt our fourteen-acre planet, not with three
rings, nor four, but with twelve, a ring for every month, a girdle of
twelve shining circles running round the year--the tinkling ice of
February in the goblet of October!--the apples of October red and ripe
on what might have been April's empty platter!

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

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

Big barns are as foolish for the ice-man as for others.  The barns of
an ice-man must needs be large, yet they are over-large if he can say
to his soul: "Soul, thou hast much ice laid up for many days; eat,
drink, and be merry among the cakes"--and when the autumn comes he
still has a barn full of solid cemented cakes that must be sawed out!
No soul can be merry long on ice--nor on sugar, nor shoes, nor stocks,
nor hay, nor anything of that sort in great quantities.  He who builds
great barns for ice, builds a refrigerator for his soul.  Ice must
never become a man's only crop; for then winter means nothing but ice;
and the year nothing but winter; for the year's never at the spring for
him, but always at February or when the ice is making and the mercury
is down to zero.

As I have already intimated, a safe kind of ice-house is one like mine,
that cannot hold more than eighteen tons--a year's supply (shrinkage
and Sunday ice-cream and other extras provided for).  Such an ice-house
is not only an ice-house, it is also an act of faith, an avowal of
confidence in the stability of the frame of things, and in their
orderly continuance.  Another winter will come, it proclaims, when the
ponds will be pretty sure to freeze.  If they don't freeze, and never
do again--well, who has an ice-house big enough in that event?

My ice-house is one of life's satisfactions; not architecturally, of
course, for there has been no great development yet in ice-house lines,
and this one was home-done; it is a satisfaction morally, being one
thing I have done that is neither more nor less.  I have the big-barn
weakness--the desire for ice--for ice to melt--as if I were no wiser
than the ice-man!  I builded bigger than I knew when I put the stone
porches about the dwelling-house, consulting in my pride the architect
first instead of the town assessors.  I took no counsel of pride in
building the ice-house, nor of fear, nor of my love of ice.  I said: "I
will build me a house to carry a year's supply of ice and no more,
however the price of ice may rise, and even with the risk of facing
seven hot and iceless years.  I have laid up enough things among the
moths and rust.  Ice against the rainy day I will provide, but ice for
my children and my children's children, ice for a possible cosmic
reversal that might twist the equator over the poles, I will not
provide for.  Nor will I go into the ice business."

Nor did I!  And I say the building of that ice-house has been an
immense satisfaction to me.  I entertain my due share of

  "Gorgons, and hydras and chimaeras dire";

but a cataclysm of the proportions mentioned above would as likely as
not bring on another Ice Age, or indeed--

  ". . . run back and fetch the Age of Gold."

To have an ice-house, and yourself escape cold storage--that seems to
me the thing.

I can fill the house in a single day, and so trade a day for a year; or
is it not rather that I crowd a year into a day?  Such days are
possible.  It is not any day that I can fill the ice-house.  Ice-day is
a chosen, dedicated day, one of the year's high festivals, the Day of
First Fruits, the ice crop being the year's earliest harvest.  Hay is
made when the sun shines, a condition sometimes slow in coming; but ice
of the right quality and thickness, with roads right, and sky right for
harvesting, requires a conjunction of right conditions so difficult as
to make a good ice-day as rare as a day in June.  June! why, June knows
no such glorious weather as that attending the harvest of the ice.

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

Toward the end of the month, however, the skies cleared, the wind
settled steadily into the north, and a great quiet began to deepen over
the fields, a quiet that at night grew so tense you seemed to hear the
close-glittering heavens snapping with the light of the stars.
Everything seemed charged with electric cold; the rich soil of the
garden struck fire like flint beneath your feet; the tall hillside
pines, as stiff as masts of steel, would suddenly crack in the brittle
silence, with a sharp report; and at intervals throughout the taut
boreal night you could hear a hollow rumbling running down the length
of the pond--the ice being split with the wide iron wedge of the cold.

Down and down for three days slipped the silver column in the
thermometer until at eight o'clock on the fourth day it stood just
above zero.  Cold?  It was splendid weather! with four inches of ice on
the little pond behind the ridge, glare ice, black as you looked across
it, but like a pane of plate glass as you peered into it at the
stirless bottom below; smooth glare ice untouched by the wing of the
wind or by even the circling runner of the skater-snow.  Another day
and night like this and the solid square-edged blocks could come in.

I looked at the glass late that night and found it still falling.  I
went on out beneath the stars.  It may have been the tightened
telephone wires overhead, or the frozen ground beneath me ringing with
the distant tread of the coming north wind, yet over these, and with
them, I heard the singing of a voiceless song, no louder than the
winging hum of bees, but vaster--the earth and air responding to a
starry lyre as some Aeolian harper, sweeping through the silvery spaces
of 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 and
blew all the next day.  Eight inches of ice by this time.  One night
more and the crop would be ripe.  And it was ripe.

I was out before the sun, tramping down to the pond with pike and saw,
the team not likely to be along for half an hour yet, the breaking of
the marvelous day all mine.  Like apples of gold in baskets of silver
were the snow-covered ridges in the light of the slow-coming dawn.  The
wind had fallen, but the chill seemed the more intense, so silently it
took hold.  My breath hung about me in little gray clouds, covering my
face, and even my coat, with rime.  As the hurt passed from my fingers,
my eyebrows seemed to become detached, my cheeks shrunk, my flesh
suddenly free of cumbering clothes.  But in half a minute the rapid red
blood would come beating back, spreading over me and out from me, with
the pain, and then the glow, of life, of perfect life that seemed
itself to feed upon the consuming cold.

No other living thing was yet abroad, no stir or sound except the
tinkling of tiny bells all about me that were set to swinging as I
moved along.  The crusted snow was strewn with them; every twig was
hung, and every pearl-bent grass blade.  Then off through the woods
rang the chime of louder bells, sleigh bells; then the shrill squeal of
iron runners over dry snow; then the broken voices of men; and soon
through the winding wood road came the horses, their bay coats white,
as all things were, with the glittering dust of the hoar frost.

It was beautiful work.  The mid-afternoon found us in the thick of a
whirling storm, the grip of the cold relaxed, the woods abloom with the
clinging snow.  But the crop was nearly in.  High and higher rose the
cold blue cakes within the ice-house doors until they touched the
rafter plate.

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




[Illustration: Seed catalogues]

IV

SEED CATALOGUES

"The new number of the 'Atlantic' came to-day," She said, stopping by
the table.  "It has your essay in it."

"Yes?" I replied, only half hearing.

"You have seen it, then?"

"No"--still absorbed in my reading.

"What is it you are so interested in?" she inquired, laying down the
new 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 turnips
that could touch this improved strain here.  I am going to plant a lot
of them this year."

"How many seed catalogues have you had this spring?"

"Only six, so far."

"And you plant your earliest seeds--"

"In April, the middle of April, though I may be able to get my first
peas in by the last of March.  You see peas"--she was backing
away--"this new Antarctic Pea--will stand a lot of cold; but beans--do
come here, and look at these Improved Kentucky Wonder Pole Beans!"
holding out the wonderfully lithographed page toward her.  But she
backed still farther away, and, putting her hands behind her, looked at
me instead, and very solemnly.

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

I have never been able to explain to her the seed catalogue.  She is as
fond of vegetables as I, and neither of us cares much for turnips--nor
for carrots, nor parsnips either, when it comes to that, our two hearts
at the table beating happily as one.  Born in the country, she
inherited a love of the garden, but a feminine garden, the garden
_parvus, minor, minimus_--so many cut-worms long, so many cut-worms
wide.  I love a garden of size, a garden that one cut-worm cannot sweep
down upon in the night.

For years I have wanted to be a farmer, but there in the furrow ahead
of me, like a bird on its nest, she has sat with her knitting; and when
I speak of loving long rows to hoe, she smiles and says, "For the
_boys_ to hoe."  Her unit of garden measure is a meal--so many beet
seeds for a meal; so many meals for a row, with never two rows of
anything, with hardly a full-length row of anything, and with all the
rows of different lengths, as if gardening were a sort of geometry or a
problem in arithmetic, figuring your vegetable with the meal for a
common divisor--how many times it will go into all your rows without
leaving a remainder!

Now I go by the seed catalogue, planting, not after the dish, as if my
only vision were a garden peeled and in the pot, but after the Bush.,
Peck, Qt., Pt., Lb., Oz., Pkg.,--so many pounds to the acre, instead of
so many seeds to the meal.

And I have tried to show her that gardening is something of a risk,
attended by chance, and no such exact science as dressmaking; that you
cannot sow seeds as you can sew buttons; that the seed-man has no
machine for putting sure-sprout-humps into each of his minute wares as
the hook-and-eye-man has; that with all wisdom and understanding one
could do no better than to buy (as I am careful to do) out of that
catalogue whose title reads "Honest Seeds"; and that even the Sower in
Holy Writ allowed somewhat for stony places and other inherent hazards
of planting time.

But she follows only afar off, affirming the primary meaning of that
parable to be plainly set forth in the context, while the secondary
meaning pointeth out the folly of sowing seed anywhere save on good
ground--which seemed to be only about one quarter of the area in the
parable that was planted; and that anyhow, seed catalogues, especially
those in colors, designed as they are to catch the simple-minded and
unwary, need to be looked into by the post-office authorities and if
possible kept from all city people, and from college professors in
particular.

She is entirely right about the college professors.  Her understanding
is based upon years of observation and the patient cooking of uncounted
pots of beans.

I confess to a weakness for gardening and no sense at all of proportion
in vegetables.  I can no more resist a seed catalogue than a toper can
his cup.  There is no game, no form of exercise, to compare for a
moment in my mind with having a row of young growing things in a patch
of mellow soil; no possession so sure, so worth while, so interesting
as a piece of land.  The smell of it, the feel of it, the call of it,
intoxicate me.  The rows are never long enough, nor the hours, nor the
muscles strong enough either, when there is 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 of
his classroom are about to open for him into the wide and greening
fields.  There is only one place to live,--here in the hills of
Hingham; and there is nothing better to do here or anywhere, than the
hoeing, or the milking, or the feeding of the hens.

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

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

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

Don't we all take ourselves a little seriously--we college professors
and others?  As if the Lord could not continue to look after his light,
if we looked after our students!  It is only in these last years that I
have learned that I can go forth unto my work and to my labor until the
evening, quitting then, and getting home in time to feed the chickens
and milk the cow.  I am a professional man, and I dwell in the midst of
professional men, all of whom are inclined to help the Lord out by
working after dark--all of whom are really in dire constitutional need
of the early roosting chickens and the quiet, ruminating cow.

To walk humbly with the hens, that's the thing--after the classes are
dismissed and the office closed.  To get out of the city, away from
books, and theories, and students, and patients, and clients, and
customers--back to real things, simple, restful, healthful things for
body and soul, homely domestic things that lay eggs at 70 cents per
dozen, and make butter at $2.25 the 5-pound box!  As for me, this does
"help immensely," affording me all necessary hair-cuts (I don't want
the "Eugenic Review"), and allowing Her to send the family washing
(except the flannels) to the laundry.

Instead of crippling normal man's normal work, country living (chickens
and a cow) will prevent his work from crippling him--keeping him a
little from his students and thus saving him from too much teaching;
keeping him from reading the "Eugenic Review" and thus saving him from
too much learning; curing him, in short, of his "constitution" that is
bound to come to some sort of a collapse unless rested and saved by
chickens and a cow.

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

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

The one in my hands was exceptionally radiant, and exceptionally full
of Novelties and Specialties for the New Year, among them being an
extraordinary new pole bean--an Improved Kentucky Wonder.  She had
backed away, as I have said, and instead of looking at the page of
beans, looked solemnly at me; then with something sorrowful, something
somewhat Sunday-like in her voice, an echo, I presume, of lessons in
the Catechism, she asked me--

"Who makes you plant beans?"

"My dear," I began, "I--"

"How many meals of pole beans did we eat last summer?"

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

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

"Why, yes, I--"

"Three--just three out of thirty poles!  Now, do you think you remember
how many bushels of those beans went utterly unpicked?"

I was visibly weakening by this time.

"Three--do you think?"

"Multiply that three by three-times-three!  And now tell me--"

But this was too much.

"My dear," I protested, "I recollect exactly.  It was--"

"No, I don't believe you do.  I cannot trust you at all with beans.
But I should like to know why you plant ten or twelve kinds of beans
when the only kind we like are limas!"

"Why--the--catalogue advises--"

"Yes, the catalogue advises--"

"You don't seem to understand, my dear, that--"

"Now, _why_ don't I understand?"

I paused.  This is always a hard question, and peculiarly hard as the
end of a series, and on a topic as difficult as beans.  I don't know
beans.  There is little or nothing about beans in the history of
philosophy or in poetry.  Thoreau says that when he was hoeing his
beans it was not beans that he hoed nor he that hoed beans--which was
the only saying that came to mind at the moment, and under the
circumstances did not seem to help me much.

"Well," I replied, fumbling among my stock of ready-made reasons,
"I--really--don't--know exactly why you don't understand.  Indeed, I
really don't know--that _I_ exactly understand.  _Everything_ is full
of things that even I can't understand--how to explain my tendency to
plant all kinds of beans, for instance; or my 'weakness,' as you call
it, for seed catalogues; or--"

She opened her magazine, and I hastened to get the stool for her feet.
As I adjusted the light for her she said:--

"Let me remind you that this is the night of the annual banquet of your
Swampatalk Club; you don't intend to forego that famous roast beef for
the seed catalogues?"

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

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

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

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

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

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

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




[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 the
closet, the whole dust-raising kit is incomplete without the
Dustless-Duster.

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

Because there are many who dust, and because they have searched in vain
for a dustless-duster, I should like to say that the Dustless-Duster
can be bought at department stores, at those that have a full line of
departments--at any department store, in fact; for the Dustless-Duster
department is the largest of all the departments, whatever the store.
Ask for it of your jeweler, grocer, milliner.  Ask for "The Ideal,"
"The Universal," "The Indispensable," of any man with anything to sell
or preach or teach, and you shall have it--the perfect thing which you
have spent life looking for; which you have thought so often to have,
but found as often that you had not.  You shall have it.  I have it.
One hangs, rather, in the kitchen on the clothes-dryer.

And one (more than one) hangs in the kitchen closet, and in the cellar,
and in the attic.  I have often brought it home, for my search has been
diligent since a certain day, years ago,--a "Commencement Day" at the
Institute.

I had never attended a Commencement exercise before; I had never been
in an opera house before; and the painted light through the roof of
windows high overhead, the strains of the orchestra from far below me,
the banks of broad-leaved palms, the colors, the odors, the confusion
of flowers and white frocks, were strangely thrilling.  Nothing had
ever happened to me in the woods like this: the exaltation, the
depression, the thrill of joy, the throb of pain, the awakening, the
wonder, the purpose, and the longing!  It was all a dream--all but the
form and the face of one girl graduate, and the title of her essay,
"The Real and the Ideal."

I do not know what large and lofty sentiments she uttered; I only
remember the way she looked them.  I did not hear the words she read;
but I still feel the absolute fitness of her theme--how real her simple
white frock, her radiant face, her dark hair!  And how ideal!

I had seen perfection.  Here was the absolute, the final, the ideal,
the indispensable!  And I was fourteen!  Now I am past forty; and upon
the kitchen clothes-dryer hangs the Dustless-Duster.

No, I have not lost the vision.  The daughter of that girl, the image
of her mother, slipped into my classroom the other day.  Nor have I
faltered in the quest.  The search goes on, and must go on; for however
often I get it, only to cast it aside, the indispensable, the ultimate,
must continue to be indispensable and ultimate, until, some day--

What matters how many times I have had it, to discover every time that
it is only a piece of cheesecloth, ordinary cheesecloth, dyed black and
stamped with red letters?  The search must go on, notwithstanding the
clutter in the kitchen closet.  The cellar is crowded with
Dustless-Dusters, too; the garret is stuffed with them.  There is
little else besides them anywhere in the house.  And this was an empty
house when I moved into it, a few years ago.

As I moved in, an old man moved out, back to the city whence a few
years before he had come; and he took back with him twelve two-horse
wagon-loads of Dustless-Dusters.  He had spent a long life collecting
them, and now, having gathered all there were in the country, he was
going back to the city, in a last pathetic, a last heroic, effort to
find the one Dustless-Duster more.

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

The old man has since died and been laid to rest.  Upon his coffin was
set a new silver plate, engraved simply and truthfully, "Brown."

We brought nothing into this world, and it is certain, says Holy Writ,
that we can carry nothing out.  But it is also certain that we shall
attempt to carry out, or try to find as soon as we are out, a
Dustless-Duster.  For we did bring something with us into this world,
losing it temporarily, to be forever losing and finding it; and when we
go into another world, will it not be to carry the thing with us there,
or to continue there our eternal search for it?  We are not so certain
of carrying nothing out of this world, but we are certain of leaving
many things behind.

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

We have more now.  I knew as I entered the house that night that
something had happened; that the hope of the early dawn had died, for
some cause, with the dusk.  The trouble showed in her eyes: mingled
doubt, chagrin, self-accusation, self-defense, defeat--familiar
symptoms.  She had seen something, something perfect, and had bought it.

I knew the look well, and the feelings all too well, and said nothing.
For suppose I had been at home that day and she had been in town?
Still, on my trip into town that morning I ran the risk of meeting the
man who sold me "The Magic Stropless Razor Salve."  No, not that 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; but
it is for no man or woman to buy one.

She had seen a vision, and had bought it--"The Perfect Automatic
Carpet-Layer."

I kept silence, as I say, which is often a thoughtful thing to do.

"Are you ill?" she ventured, handing me my tea.

"No."

"Tired?"

"No."

"I hope you are not very tired, for the Parsonage Committee brought the
new carpet this afternoon, and I have started to put it down.  I
thought we would finish it this evening.  It won't be any work at all
for you, for I--I--bought you one of these to-day to put it down
with,"--pushing an illustrated circular across the table toward me.


ANY CHILD CAN USE IT

THE PERFECT AUTOMATIC CARPET-LAYER

No more carpet-laying bills.  Do your own laying.  No wrinkles.  No
crowded corners.  No sore knees.  No pounded fingers.  No broken backs.
Stand up and lay your carpet with the Perfect Automatic.  Easy as
sweeping.  Smooth as putting paper on the wall.  You hold the handle,
and the Perfect Automatic does the rest.  Patent Applied For.  Price--


--but it was not the price!  It was the tool--a weird hybrid tool, part
gun, part rake, part catapult, part curry-comb, fit apparently for
almost any purpose, from the business of blunderbuss to the office of
an apple-picker.  Its handle, which any child could hold, was somewhat
shorter and thicker than a hoe-handle, and had a slotted tin barrel, a
sort of intestine, on its ventral side along its entire length.  Down
this intestine, their points sticking through the slot, moved the tacks
in single file to a spring-hammer close to the floor.  This hammer was
operated by a lever or tongue at the head of the handle, the connection
between the hammer at the distal end and the lever at the proximal end
being effected by means of a steel-wire spinal cord down the dorsal
side of the handle.  Over the fist of a hammer spread a jaw of sharp
teeth to take hold of the carpet.  The thing could not talk; but it
could do almost anything else, so fearfully and wonderfully was it made.

As for laying carpets with it, any child could do that.  But we did n't
have any children then, and I had quite outgrown my childhood.  I tried
to be a boy again just for that night.  I grasped the handle of the
Perfect Automatic, stretched with our united strength, and pushed down
on the lever.  The spring-hammer drew back, a little trap or mouth at
the end of the slotted tin barrel opened for the tack, the tack jumped
out, turned over, landed point downward upon the right spot in the
carpet, the crouching hammer sprang, and--

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

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

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

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

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

"The Friend" was a steel-wire hoop, shaped and jointed like a pair of
calipers, but knobbed at its points with little metal balls.  The
instrument was made to open and spring closed about the Fat Man's neck,
and to hold, by means of a clasp on each side, a napkin, or bib, spread
securely over the Fat Man's bosom.

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

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

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

"But fat does n't run in my family," I 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 a
lath.  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 't
wa'n't for this little 'Friend.'  I can't eat without it.  I miss it
more when I am eatin' than I miss the victuals.  I carry one with me
all the time.  Awful handy little thing.  Now--"

"But--" I put in.

"Certainly," he continued, with the smoothest-running motor I ever
heard, "but here's the point of the whole matter, as you might say.
_This_ thing is up to date, Professor.  Now, the old-fashioned way of
tying a knot in the corner of your napkin and anchoring it under your
Adam's apple--_that's_ gone by.  Also the stringed bib and safety-pin.
Both those devices were crude--but necessary, of course, Professor--and
inconvenient, and that old-fashioned knot really dangerous; for the
knot, pressing against the Adam's apple, or the apple, as you might
say, trying to swallow the knot--well, if there isn't less apoplexy and
strangulation when this little Friend finds universal application, then
I 'm no Prophet, as the Good Book says."

"But you see--" I broke in.

"I do, Professor.  It's right here.  I understand your objection.  But
it is purely verbal and academic, Professor.  You are troubled
concerning the name of this indispensable article.  But you know, as
well as I--even better with your education, Professor--that there 's
nothing, absolutely nothing in a name.  'What's in a name?' the poet
says.  And I 'll agree with you--though, of course, it's
confidential--that 'The Fat Man's Friend' is, as you literary folks
would say, more or less of a _nom de plume_.  Isn't it?  Besides,--if
you '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 could
n't tell them apart.  You might just as well have one of these, and run
no chances getting one of the next lot.  They'll be precisely the same;
only, you see, they're going to name the next ones 'Every Bosom's
Friend,' to fit lean and fat, and without distinction of sex.  Ideal
thing now, is n't it?  Yes, that's right--fifteen cents--two for
twenty-five, Professor?--don't you want another for your wife?"

No, I did not want another for her.  But if _she_ had been at home, and
I had been away, who knows but that all six of us had come off with a
"Friend" apiece?  They were a bargain by the half-dozen.

A bargain?  Did anybody ever get a bargain--something worth more than
he paid?  Well--you shall, when you bring home a Dustless-Duster.

And who has not brought it home!  Or who is not about to bring it home!
Not all the years that I have searched, not all the loads that I have
collected, count against the conviction that at last I have it--the
perfect thing--until I _reach_ home.  But with several of my
perfections I have never yet reached home, or I am waiting an opportune
season to give them to my wife.  I have been disappointed; but let no
one try to tell me that there is no such thing as Perfection.  Is not
the desire for it the breath of my being?  Is not the search for it the
end of my existence?  Is not the belief that at last I possess it--in
myself, my children, my breed of hens, my religious creed, my political
party--is not this conviction, I say, all there is of existence?

It is very easy to see that perfection is not in any of the other
political parties.  During a political campaign, not long since, I
wrote to a friend in New Jersey,--

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

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

"As I belong to the only party of real reform, I shall stick to it this
year, as I always have, and vote the straight ticket."

Is there a serener faith than this human faith in perfection?  A surer,
more unshakable belief than this human belief in the present possession
of it?

There is only one thing deeper in the heart of man than his desire for
completeness, and that is his conviction of being about to attain unto
it.  He dreams of completeness by night; works for completeness by day;
buys it of every agent who comes along; votes for it at every election;
accepts it with every sermon; and finds it--momentarily--every time he
finds himself.  The desire for it is the sweet spring of all his
satisfactions; the possession of it the bitter fountain of many of his
woes.

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

As to _hens_:--

There are many breeds of fairly good hens, and I have tried as many
breeds as I have had years of keeping hens, but not until the poultry
show, last winter, did I come upon the perfect hen.  I had been working
toward her through the Bantams, Brahmas, and Leghorns, to the Plymouth
Rocks.  I had tried the White and the Barred Plymouth Rocks, but they
were not the hen.  Last winter I came upon the originator of the Buff
Plymouth Rocks--and here she was!  I shall breed nothing henceforth but
Buff Plymouth Rocks.

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

Moreover, the Buff Rock is a layer, is _the_ layer, maturing as she
does about four weeks later than the Rhode Island Reds, and so escaping
that fatal early fall laying with its attendant moult and eggless
interim until March!  On the other hand, the Buff Rock matures about a
month earlier than the logy, slow-growing breeds, and so gets a good
start before the cold and eggless weather comes.

And such an egg!  There are white eggs and brown eggs, large and small
eggs, but only one ideal egg--the Buff Rock's.  It is of a soft lovely
brown, yet whitish enough for a New York market, but brown enough,
however, to meet the exquisite taste of the Boston trade.  In fact it
is neither white nor brown, but rather a delicate blend of the two--a
new tone, indeed, a bloom rather, that I must call fresh-laid lavender.

So, at least, I am told.  My pullets are not yet laying, having had a
very late start last spring.  But the real question, speaking
professionally, with any breed of fowls is a market question: How do
they dress?  How do they eat?

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

Can there be any doubt of the existence of hen-perfection?  Any
question of my having attained unto it--with the maturing of this new
breed of hens?

For all spiritual purposes, that is, for all satisfactions, the ideal
hen 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 marrying
them.  There is seldom any trouble with them before.  Our belief in
feminine perfection is as profound and as eternal as youth.  And the
perfection is just as real as the faith.  Youth is always bringing the
bride home--to hang her on the kitchen clothes-dryer.  She turns out to
be ordinary cheese-cloth, dyed a more or less fast black--this
perfection that he had stamped in letters of indelible red!

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

Fourteen! the trouble all began at fourteen.  No, the trouble began
with Adam, though Eve has been responsible for much of it since.  Adam
had all that a man should have wanted in his perfect Garden.
Nevertheless he wanted Eve.  Eve in turn had Adam, a perfect man! but
she wanted something more--if only the apple tree in the middle of the
Garden.  And we all of us were there in that Garden--with Adam thinking
he was getting perfection in Eve; with Eve incapable of appreciating
perfection in Adam.  The trouble is human.

  "Flounder, flounder in the sea,
  Prythee quickly come to me!
  For my wife, Dame Isabel,
  Wants strange things I scarce dare tell."


"And what does she want _now_?" asks the flounder.

"Oh, she wants to _vote_ now," says the 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 for
wanting an apple tree besides, or the ballot?

'T is no use to forbid her.  Yes, she has you, but--but Eve had Adam,
too, another perfect man!  Don't forbid her, for she will have it
anyhow.  It may not turn out to be all that she thinks it is.  But did
you turn out to be all that she thought you were?  She will have a bite
of this new apple if she has to disobey, and die for it, because such
disobedience and death are in answer to a higher command, and to a
larger life from within.  Eve's discovery that Adam was cheese-cloth,
and her reaching out for something better, did not, as Satan promised,
make us as God; but it did make us different from all the other animals
in the Garden, placing us even above the angels,--so far above, as to
bring us, apparently, by a new and divine descent, into Eden.

The hope of the race is in Eve,--in her making the best she can of
Adam; in her clear 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 ballot
now.

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

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

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

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

I reached for a doughnut, broke it, slowly, dipped it up and down in
the cup of mustard and tried for time.  Not a soul stirred.  Not a word
or sound broke the tense silence about the operating-table.

"What--do--you--think--of--Jonah?"

"Well, Sister Smith, I--"

"Never mind.  Don't commit yourself.  You needn't tell me what you
think of Jonah.
You--are--too--young--to--know--what--you--think--of--Jonah.  But I
will tell you what _I_ think of Jonah: if the Scriptures had said that
Jonah swallowed the whale, it would be just as easy to believe as it is
that the whale swallowed Jonah."

"So it would, Sister Smith," I answered weakly, "just as easy."

"And now, my young Brother, you preach the Scriptures--the old genuine
inspired Authorized Version, word for word, just as God spoke it!"

Sister Smith has gone to Heaven, but in spite of her theology.  Dear
old soul, she sent me many a loaf of her salt-rising bread after that,
for she had as warm a heart as ever beat its brave way past eighty.

But she had neither a perfect Book, nor a perfect Creed, nor a perfect
Salvation.  She did not need them; nor could she have used them; for
they would have posited a divine command to be perfect--a too difficult
accomplishment for any of us, even for Sister Smith.

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

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

We have never found it,--this perfect thing,--and perhaps we never
shall.  But the desire, the search, the faith, must not fail us, as at
times they seem to do.  At times the very tides of the ocean seem to
fail,--when the currents cease to run.  Yet when they are at slack
here, they are at flood on the other side of the world, turning already
to 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 no
nearer it now than when I started, yet the search has carried me far
from that start.  And if I never arrive, then, at least, I shall keep
going on, which, in itself maybe the thing--the Perfect Thing that I am
seeking.




[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 Mother
Goose.  I might steal a pig, perhaps, like Tom the Piper's Son, but
never would I do such a thing as Margery did; the dreadful picture of
her nose and of that bottle in her hand made me sure of that.  And
yet--snore on, Margery!--I sold my _plough_ and bought an automobile!
As if an automobile would carry me

  "To the island-valley of Avilion,"

where I should no longer need the touch of the soil and the slow simple
task to heal me of my grievous wound!

Speed, distance, change--are these the cure for that old hurt we call
living, the long dull ache of winter, the throbbing bitter-sweet pain
of spring?  We seek for something different, something not different
but faster and still faster, to fill our eyes with flying, our ears
with rushing, our skins with scurrying, our diaphragms, which are our
souls, with the thrill of curves, and straight stretches, of lifts, and
drops, and sudden halts--as of elevators, merry-go-rounds, chutes,
scenic railways, aeroplanes, and heavy low-hung cars.

To go--up or down, or straight away--anyway, but round and round, and
slowly--as if one could speed away from being, or ever travel beyond
one's self!  How pathetic to sell all that one has and buy an
automobile! to shift one's grip from the handles of life to the wheel
of change! to forsake the furrow for the highway, the rooted soil for
the flying dust, the here for the there; imagining that somehow a car
is more than a plough, that going is the last word in
living--demountable rims and non-skid tires, the great gift of the God
Mechanic, being the 1916 model of the wings of the soul!

But women must weep in spite of modern mechanics, and men must plough.
Petroleum, with all of its by-products, cannot be served for bread.  I
have tried many substitutes for ploughing; and as for the automobile, I
have driven that thousands of miles, driven it almost daily, summer and
winter; but let the blackbirds return, let the chickweed start in the
garden, then the very stones of the walls cry out--"Plough! plough!"

It is not the stones I hear, but the entombed voices of earlier
primitive selves far back in my dim past; those, and the call of the
boy I was yesterday, whose landside toes still turn in, perhaps, from
walking in the furrow.  When that call comes, no

  "Towered cities please us then
  And the busy hum of men,"

or of automobiles.  I must plough.  It is the April wind that wakes the
call--

  "Zephirus eek, with his sweete breeth"--

and many hearing it long to "goon on pilgrimages," or to the Maine
woods to fish, or, waiting until the 19th, to leave Boston by boat and
go up and down the shore to see how fared their summer cottages during
the winter storms; some even imagine they have malaria and long for
bitters--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 landes"

that I long for: but simply for the soil, for the warming, stirring
earth, for my mother.  It is back to her breast I would go, back to the
wide sweet fields, to the slow-moving team and the lines about my
shoulder, to the even furrow rolling from the mould-board, to the taste
of the soil, the sight of the sky, the sound of the robins and
bluebirds and blackbirds, and the ringing notes of Highhole over the
sunny fields.

I hold the plough as my only hold upon the earth, and as I follow
through the fresh and fragrant furrow I am planted with every footstep,
growing, budding, blooming into a spirit of the spring.  I can catch
the blackbirds ploughing, I can turn under with my furrow the laughter
of the flowers, the very joy of the skies.  But if I so much as turn in
my tracks, the blackbirds scatter; if I shout, Highhole is silent; if I
chase the breeze, it runs away; I might climb into the humming maples,
might fill my hands with arbutus and bloodroot, might run and laugh
aloud with the light; as if with feet I could overtake it, could catch
it in my hands, and in my heart could hold it all--this living earth,
shining sky, flowers, buds, voices, colors, odors--this spring!

But I can plough--while the blackbirds come close behind me in the
furrow; and I can be the spring.

I could plough, I mean, when I had a plough.  But I sold it for five
dollars and bought a second-hand automobile for fifteen hundred--as
everybody else has.  So now I do as everybody else does,--borrow my
neighbor's plough, or still worse, get my neighbor to do my ploughing,
being still blessed with a neighbor so steadfast and simple as to
possess a plough.  But I must plough or my children's children will
never live to have children,--they will have motor cars instead.  The
man who pulls down his barns and builds a garage is not planning for
posterity.  But perhaps it does not matter; for while we are purring
cityward over the sleek and tarry roads, big hairy Finns are following
the plough round and round our ancestral fields, planting children in
the furrows, so that there shall be some one here when we have motored
off to possess the land.

I see no way but to keep the automobile and buy another plough, not for
my children's sake any more than for my own.  There was an old man
living in this house when I bought it who moved back into the city and
took with him, among other things, a big grindstone and two
long-handled hayforks--for crutches, did he think? and to keep a
cutting edge on the scythe of his spirit as he mowed the cobblestones?
When I am old and my children compel me to move back near the asylums
and hospitals, I shall carry into the city with me a plough; and I
shall pray the police to let me go every springtime to the Garden or
the Common and there turn a few furrows as one whom still his mother
comforteth.

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

No other labor, no other contact with the earth is like ploughing.  You
may play upon it, travel over it, delve into it, build your house down
on it; but when you strike into the bosom of the fields with your
ploughshare, wounding and healing as your feet follow deep in the long
fresh cut, you feel the throbbing of the heart of life through the
oaken handles as you never felt it before; you are conscious of a
closer union,--dust with dust,--of a more mystical union,--spirit with
spirit,--than any other approach, work, or rite, or ceremony, can give
you.  You move, but your feet seem to reach through and beyond the
furrow like the roots of the oak tree; sun and air and soil are yours
as if the blood in your veins were the flow of all sweet saps, oak and
maple and willow, and your breath their bloom of green and garnet and
gold.

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

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

Nothing more primitive than the plough have we brought with us out of
our civilized past.  In the furrow was civilization cradled, and there,
if anywhere, shall it be interred.

You go forth unto your day's work, if you have land enough, until the
Lord's appointed close; then homeward plod your weary way, leaving the
world to the poets.  Not yours

  "The hairy gown, the mossy cell."

You have no need of them.

What more

  "Of every star that Heaven doth shew
  And every hearb that sips the dew"

can the poet spell than all day long you have _felt_?  Has ever poet
handled more of life than you?  Has he ever gone deeper than the bottom
of your furrow, or asked any larger faith than you of your field?  Has
he ever found anything sweeter or more satisfying than the wholesome
toilsome round of the plough?




[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's
going to get."

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

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

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

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

It was sound advice.  I have a rich farm.  I have raised beans that
were beans, and I have raised birds, besides, and beasts,--a perfectly
enormous crop of woodchucks; I have cultivated everything up to the
stars; but I find it necessary to hang on a while yet to my talkin' job
in the city.

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

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

"When my hoe tinkled against the stones, that music echoed to the woods
and the sky, and was an accompaniment to my labor which yielded an
instant and immeasurable crop.  It was no longer beans that I hoed, nor
I that hoed beans."

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

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

Is not the commonplaceness, the humdrumness, the dead-levelness, of
life largely a matter of 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 are
beans"!  He raises beans; she cooks beans; they eat beans.  Life is
pretty much all beans.  If "beans are beans," why, how much more is
life?

He runs his farm on halves with the soil, and there the sharing stops,
and consequently there the returns stop.  He gives to the soil and the
soil gives back, thirty, sixty, an hundredfold.  What if he should give
to the skies as well?--to the wild life that dwells with him on his
land?--to the wild flowers that bank his meadow brook?--to the trees
that cover his pasture slopes?  Would they, like the soil, give
anything back?

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

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

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

We certainly need a rural uplift.  We need an urban uplift, too, no
doubt, for I suppose "beans are beans" in Boston, just as they are here
in Hingham.  But it does seem the more astonishing that in the country,
where the very environment is poetry, where companionship with living
things is constant, where even the labor of one's hands is cooeperation
with the divine forces of nature--the more astonishing, I say, that
under these conditions life should so often be but bare existence, mere
beans.

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

But such a contract is absolutely necessary if one is to get out of
farm life--out of any life--its flowers and fragrance, as well as its
pods and beans.  And, first, one must be convinced, must acknowledge to
one's self, that the flower and fragrance are needed in life, are as
useful as pods and beans.  A row of sweet peas is as necessary on the
farm as a patch of the best wrinkled variety in the garden.

But to come back to the fox.

Now, I have lived long enough, and I have had that fox steal roosters
enough, to understand, even feel, my neighbor's wrath perfectly.  I
fully sympathize with him.  What, then, you ask, of my sympathy for the
fox?

At times, I must admit, the strain has been very great.  More than once
(three times, to be exact) I have fired at that same fox to kill.  I
have lost many a rooster, but those I have not lost are many, many
more.  Browned to a turn, and garnished with parsley, a rooster is
almost a poem.  So was that wild fox, the other morning, almost a poem,
standing on the bare knoll here near the house, his form half-shrouded
in the early mist, his keen ears pricked, his pointed nose turned
toward the yard where the hens were waking up.

Something primitive, something wild and free and stirring, something
furtive, crafty, cunning--the shadow of the dark primeval forest, at
sight of him, fell across the glaring common-placeness of that whole
tame day.

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

Our American farm life needs new and better machinery, better methods,
better buildings, better roads, better schools, better stock; but given
all of these, and farm life must still continue to be earthy, material,
mere beans--only more of them--until the farm is run on shares with all
the universe around, until the farmer learns not only to reap the
sunshine, but also to harvest the snow; learns to get a real and rich
crop out of his landscape, his shy, wild neighbors, his independence
and liberty, his various, difficult, yet strangely poetical, tasks.

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

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

And I said as much to Joel.

"Beans," I said, "must be raised.  Much of life must be spent hoeing
the beans.  But I am going to ask myself: 'Is it _mere_ beans that I am
hoeing?  And is it the _whole_ of me that is hoeing the beans?'"

"Well," he replied, "you settle down on that farm of yours as I settled
on mine, and I '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 should
be--as I see it."

"Now, that is n't the way I see it at all.  This is God's earth,--and
there could n't be a better one."

"Of course there could n't, but there was one once."

"When?" I asked, astonished.

"In the beginning."

"You mean the Garden of Eden?"

"Just that."

"Why, man, this earth, this farm of yours, is the Garden of Eden."

"But it says God drove him out of the Garden and, what's more, it says
He made him farm for a livin', don't it?"

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

"Well, then, as I see it, that settles it, don't it?  God puts a man on
a farm when he ain't fit for anything else.  'Least, that's the way I
see it.  That's how I got here, I s'pose, and I s'pose that's why I
stay here."

"But," said I, "there's another version of that farm story."

"Not in the Bible?" he asked, now beginning to edge away, for it was
not often that I could get him so near to books as this.  Let me talk
books with Joel Moore and the talk lags.  Farming and neighboring are
Joel's strong points, not books.  He is a general farmer and a kind of
universal neighbor (that being his specialty); on neighborhood and farm
topics his mind is admirably full and clear.

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

He faced me squarely, a light of confidence in his eye, a ring of
certainty, not to say triumph, in his tones:--

"You 're sure of that, Professor?"

"Reasonably."

"Well, I 'm not a college man, but I 've read the Bible.  Let's go in
and take a look at Holy Writ on farmin',"--leading the way with
alacrity into the house.

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

The daylight came darkly through the thick muslin draperies at the
window and fell in a faint line across the floor.  An oval frame of
hair-flowers hung on the wall opposite me--a somber wreath of
immortelles for the departed--_of_ the departed--black, brown, auburn,
and grizzled-gray, with one touch (a calla lily, I think) of the
reddest hair I ever beheld.  In one corner of the room stood a closed
cabinet organ; behind me, a tall base-burner, polished till it seemed
to light the dimmest corners of the room.  There was no fire in the
stove; there was no air in the room, only the mingled breath of soot
and the hair-flowers and the plush album and the stuffed blue jay under
the bell-jar on the mantelpiece, and the heavy brass-clasped Bible.
There was no coffin in the room; but Joel took up the Bible and handed
it to me as if we were having a funeral.

"Read me that other account of Adam's farm," he said; "I can't see
without my specs."

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

"Sit down, Joel," I said, assuming an authority in his house that I saw
he could not quite feel.

"I can't; I 've got my overhalls on."

"Let us do all things decently and in order, Joel," I continued,
touching the great Book 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 me
with furtive, sidelong glances, as if he saw ghosts in the dark corners.

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

"I '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 on
with the account of the dry, rainless world, and with no man to till
the soil; then to the forming of Adam out of the dust, and the planting
of Eden; of the rivers, of God's mistake in trying Adam alone in the
Garden, of the rib made into Eve, of the prohibited tree, the snake,
the wormy apple, the fall, the curse, the thorns--and how, in order to
crown the curse and make it real, God drove the sinful pair forth from
the Garden and condemned them to farm for a living.

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

"Here it is," I answered, "but we 've got to have some fresh air and
more light on it," rising as I spoke and reaching for the bolt on the
front door.  With a single quick jerk I had it back, and throwing
myself forward, swung the door wide to the open sky, while Joel groaned
again, and the big, rusty hinges thrice groaned at the surprise and
shock of it.  But the thing was done.

A flood of warm, sweet sunshine poured over us; a breeze,
wild-rose-and-elder-laden, swept in out of the broad meadow that
stretched from the very doorstep to a distant hill of pines, and
through the air, like a shower in June, fell the notes of soaring,
singing bobolinks.

Joel stood looking out over his farm with the eyes of a stark stranger.
He had never seen it from the front door before.  It was a new prospect.

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

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

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

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

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




[Illustration: A pilgrim from Dubuque]

VIII

A PILGRIM FROM DUBUQUE

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

I may be carting gravel when he comes, as I was the day the Pilgrim
from Dubuque arrived.  Swinging the horses into the yard with their
staggering load, I noticed him laboring up the Hill by the road in
front.  He stopped in the climb for a breathing spell,--a tall, erect
old man in black, with soft, high-crowned hat, and about him something,
even at the distance, that was--I don't
know--unusual--old-fashioned--Presbyterian.

Dropping the lines, I went down to greet the stranger, though I saw he
carried a big blue book under his arm.  To my knowledge no book-agent
had ever been seen on the Hill.  But had I never seen one anywhere I
should have known this man had not come to sell me a book.  "More
likely," I thought, "he has come to give me a book.  We shall see."
Yet I could not quite make him out, for while he was surely
professional, he was not exactly clerical, in spite of a certain
Scotch-Covenanter-something in his appearance.  He had never preached
at men, I knew, as instinctively as I knew he had never persuaded them
with books or stocks or corner-lots in Lhassa.  He had a fine, kindly
face, that was singularly clear and simple, in which blent the shadows
and sorrows of years with the serene and mellow light of good thoughts.

"Is this Mullein Hill?" he began, shifting the big blue copy of the
"Edinburgh Review" from under his arm.

"You're on Mullein Hill," I replied, "and welcome."

"Is--are--you Dallas Lore--"

"Sharp?" I said, finishing for him.  "Yes, sir, this is Dallas Lore
Sharp, but these are not his over-alls--not yet; for they have never
been washed and are about three sizes too large for him."

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

"I am getting old," he went on quickly, his face clearing; "my
perceptions are not so keen, nor my memory so quick as it used to be.
I should have known that 'good writing must have a pre-literary
existence as lived reality; the writing must be only the necessary
accident of its being lived over again in thought'"--quoting verbatim,
though I was slow in discovering it, from an essay of mine, published
years before.

It was now my turn to allow for shrinkage.  Had he learned this passage
for the visit and applied it thus by chance?  My face must have showed
my wonder, my incredulity, indeed, for explaining himself he said,--

"I am a literary pilgrim, sir--"

"Who has surely lost his way," I ventured.

Then with a smile that made no more allowances necessary he assured
me,--

"Oh, no, sir!  I am quite at home in the hills of Hingham.  I have been
out at Concord for a few days, and am now on the main road from Concord
to Dubuque.  I am Mr. Kinnier, Dr. Kinnier, of Dubuque, Iowa,
and"--releasing my hand--"let me see"--pausing as we reached the top of
the hill, and looking about in search of something--"Ah, yes [to
himself], there on the horizon they stand, those two village spires,
'those tapering steeples where they look up to worship toward the sky,
and look down to scowl across the street'"--quoting again, word for
word, from another of my essays.  Then to me: "They are a little
farther away and a little closer together than I expected to see
them--too close [to himself again] for God to tell from which side of
the street the prayers and praises come, mingling as they must in the
air."

He said it with such thought-out conviction, such sweet sorrow, and
with such relief that I began now to fear for what he might quote next
and _miss_ from the landscape.  The spires were indeed there (may
neither one of them now be struck by lightning!); but what a terrible
memory the man has!  Had he come from Dubuque to prove me--

The spires, however, seemed to satisfy him; he could steer by them; and
to my great relief, he did not demand a chart to each of the wonders of
Mullein Hill--my thirty-six woodchuck holes, etc., etc., nor ask, as
John Burroughs did, for a sight of the fox that performed in one of my
books somewhat after the manner of modern _literary_ foxes.  Literary
foxes!  One or another of us watches this Hilltop day and night with a
gun for literary foxes!  I want no pilgrims from Dubuque, no
naturalists from Woodchuck Lodge, poking into the landscape or under
the stumps for spires and foxes and boa constrictors and things that
they cannot find outside the book.  I had often wondered what I would
do if such visitors ever came.  Details, I must confess, might on many
pages be difficult to verify; but for some years now I have faithfully
kept my four boys here in the woods to prove the reality of my main
theme.

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

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

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


But I did not go on with the teaming.  Gravel is a thing that will
wait.  Here it lies where it was dumped by the glaciers of the Ice Age.
There was no hurry about it; whereas pilgrims and poets from Dubuque
must be stopped as they pass.  So we sat down and talked--of books and
men, of poems and places, but mostly of books,--books I had written,
and other books--great books "whose dwelling is the light of setting
suns."  Then we walked--over the ridges, down to the meadow and the
stream, and up through the orchard, still talking of books, my strange
visitor, whether the books were prose or poetry, catching up the volume
somewhere with a favorite passage, and going on--reading on--from
memory, line after line, pausing only to repeat some exquisite turn, or
to comment upon some happy thought.

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

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

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

but this is no one of them.  I have carried it these many years."

Our walk brought us back to the house and into the cool living-room
where a few sticks were burning on the hearth.  Taking one of the
rocking-chairs before the fireplace, the Pilgrim sat for a time looking
into the blaze.  Then he began to rock gently back and forth, his eyes
fixed upon the fire, quite forgetful evidently of my presence, and
while he rocked his lips moved as, half audibly, he began to speak with
some one--not with me--with some one invisible to me who had come to
him out of the flame.  I listened as he spoke, but it was a language
that I could not understand.

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

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

And this too was language I could not understand.  I watched him in
silence, 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; and
on 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 disparaging
Thoreau for my benefit.  Thoreau is nearer the stars than I am.  I may
be more human, but he is certainly more divine.  His moral and ethical
value I think is much greater, and he has a heroic quality that I
cannot approach."

There was something queer in this.  Why had I not understood Thoreau?
Wild he surely was, and irritating too, because of a certain strain and
self-consciousness.  A "counter-irritant" he called himself.  Was this
not true?

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

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

And then in a low, thrilling voice, timed as to some solemn chant, he
began, the paper still folded in his hands:--

  "A lonely wand'rer stands beside the stone
  That marks the grave where Thoreau's ashes lie;
  An object more revered than monarch's throne,
  Or pyramids beneath Egyptian sky.

  "He turned his feet from common ways of men,
  And forward went, nor backward looked around;
  Sought truth and beauty in the forest glen,
  And in each opening flower glory found.

  "He paced the woodland paths in rain and sun;
  With joyous thrill he viewed the season's sign;
  And in the murmur of the meadow run
  With raptured ear he heard a voice divine.

  "Truth was the beacon ray that lured him on.
  It lit his path on plain and mountain height,
  In wooded glade and on the flow'ry lawn--
  Where'er he strayed, it was his guiding light.

  "Close by the hoary birch and swaying pine
  To Nature's voice he bent a willing ear;
  And there remote from men he made his shrine,
  Her face to see, her many tongues to hear.

  "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 deep
waters of Walden darkened in the long shadows of the trees that were
reaching out across the pond.  Evening was close at hand.  Would the
veery sing again?  Or was it the faint, sweet music of the bells of
Lincoln, Acton, and Concord that I heard, humming in the pine needles
outside the window, as if they were the strings of a harp?

The chanting voice died away and--the room was still; but I seem to
hear that voice every time I open the pages of "The Week" or "Walden."
And the other day, as I stood on the shores of the pond, adding my
stone to the cairn where the cabin used to stand, a woodthrush off in
the trees (trees that have grown great since Thoreau last looked upon
them), began to chant--or was it the Pilgrim from Dubuque?--

  "Truth was the beacon ray that lured him on.
  It lit his path on plain and mountain height,
  In wooded glade and on the flow'ry lawn--
  Where'er he strayed, it was his guiding light."




[Illustration: The Honey Flow]

IX

THE HONEY FLOW

And this our life, exempt from public haunt and those swift currents
that carry the city-dweller resistlessly into the movie show, leaves us
caught in the quiet eddy of little unimportant things,--digging among
the rutabagas, playing the hose at night, casting the broody hens into
the "dungeon," or watching the bees.

Many hours of my short life I have spent watching the bees,--blissful,
idle hours, saved from the wreck of time, hours fragrant of white
clover and buckwheat and filled with the honey of nothing-to-do; every
minute of them capped, like the comb within the hive, against the
coming winter of my discontent.  If, for the good of mankind, I could
write a new Commandment to the Decalogue, it would read: Thou shalt
keep a hive of bees.

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

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

I cannot think of a better habit to contract than keeping bees.  What a
quieting, pastoral turn it gives to life!  You can keep them in the
city--on the roof or in the attic--just as you can actually live in the
city, if you have to; but bees, even more than cows, suggest a rural
prospect, old-fashioned gardens, pastures, idyls,--things out of
Virgil, and Theocritus--and out of Spenser too,--

    "And more, to lulle him in his slumber soft,
  A trickling streame from high rock tumbling downe,
  And ever drizling raine upon the loft,
  Mixt with a murmuring winde, much like the sowne
  Of swarming bees, did cast him in a swowne:
  No other noyse, nor peoples troublous cryes,
  As still are wont t' annoy the walled towne
  Might there be heard: but carelesse Quiet lyes,
  Wrapt in 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 the
bee-keeper and I will show you a poet; a lover of waters that go softly
like Siloa; with the breath of sage and pennyroyal about him; an
observer of nature, who can handle his bees without veil or gloves.
Only a few men keep bees,--only philosophers, I have found.  They are a
different order utterly from hen-men, bee-keeping and chicken-raising
being respectively the poetry and prose of country life, though there
are some things to be said for the hen, deficient as the henyard is in
euphony, rhythm, and tune.

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

Bee-keeping, like keeping righteous, is exceedingly difficult; it is
one of the fine arts, and no dry-mash-and-green-bone affair as of hens.
Queens are a peculiar people, and their royal households, sometimes an
hundred thousand strong, are as individual as royal houses are liable
to be.

I have never had two queens alike, never two colonies that behaved the
same, never two seasons that made a repetition of a particular handling
possible.  A colony of bees is a perpetual problem; the strain of the
bees, the age and disposition of the queen, the condition of the
colony, the state of the weather, the time of the season, the
little-understood laws of the honey-flow,--these singly, and often all
in combination, make the wisest handling of a colony of bees a question
fresh every summer morning and new every evening.

For bees should be "handled," that is, bees left to their own devices
may make you a little honey--ten to thirty pounds in the best of
seasons; whereas rightly handled they will as easily make you three
hundred pounds of pure comb honey--food of prophets, and with saleratus
biscuit instead of locusts, a favorite dish with the sons of prophets
here on Mullein Hill.

Did you ever eat apple-blossom honey?  Not often, for it is only rarely
that the colony can be built up to a strength sufficient to store this
earliest flow.  But I have sometimes caught it; and then as the season
advances, and flow after flow comes on with the breaking of the great
floral waves, I get other flavors,--pure white clover, wild raspberry,
golden sumac, pearly white clethra, buckwheat, black as axle grease,
and last of all, the heavy, rich yellow of the goldenrod.  These, by
careful watching, I get pure and true to flavor like so many fruit
extracts at the soda fountains.

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

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

Marking their line of flight I started into the low jungle to find
them.  I was half a mile in when I caught the busy hum of wings.  I
looked but could see nothing,--not a flower of any sort, nothing but
oak, maple, birch, and young pine saplings just a little higher than my
head.  But the air was full of bees; yet not of swarming bees, for that
is a different and unmistakable hum.  Then I found myself in the thick
of a copse of witch-hazel up and down the stems of which the bees were
wildly buzzing.  There was no dew left on the bushes, so it was not
that they were after; on looking more closely I saw that they were
crawling down the stems to the little burrs containing the seed of last
fall's flowering.  Holding to the top of the burr with their hind legs
they seemed to drink head down from out of the base of the burr.

Picking one of these, I found a hole at its base, and inside, instead
of seeds, a hollow filled with plant lice or aphides, that the bees
were milking.  Here were big black ants, too, and yellow wasps drinking
from the same pail.

But a bee's tongue, delicate as it is, would crush a fragile plant
louse.  I picked another burr, squeezing it gently, when there issued
from the hole at the base a drop of crystal-clear liquid, held in the
thinnest of envelopes, which I tasted and found sweet.  In burr after
burr I found these sacks or cysts of sweets secreted by the aphides for
the bees to puncture and drain.  The largest of them would fill a bee
at a draught.  Some of the burrs contained big fat grubs of a beetle
unknown to me,--the creature that had eaten the seeds, bored the hole
at the base, and left the burr cleaned and garnished for the aphides.
These in turn invited the bees, and the bees, carrying this "honey-dew"
home, mixed it with the pure nectar of the flowers and spoiled the crop.

Can you put stoppers into these millions of honey-dew jugs?  Can you
command your bees to avoid these dire bushes and drink only of the
wells at the bottoms of the white-clover tubes?  Hardly that, but you
can clip the wing of your queen and make her obedient; you can command
the colony not to swarm, not to waste its strength in drones, and you
can tell it where and how to put this affected honey so that the pure
crop is not spoiled; you can order the going out and coming in of those
many thousands so that every one is a faithful, wise, and efficient
servant, gathering the fragrance and sweet of the summer from every
bank whereon the clover and the wild mints blow.

Small things these for a man with anything to do?  Small indeed, but
demanding large love and insight, patience, foresight, and knowledge.
It does not follow that a man who can handle a colony of bees can rule
his spirit or take a city, but the virtues absolutely necessary to the
bee-keeper are those required for the guiding of nations; and there
should be a bee-plank incorporated into every party platform, promising
that president, cabinet, and every member of congress along with the
philosophers 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 her
peas to pod.  She set the colander between us, emptied half of her task
into my hat, and said:--

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

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

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

"No, not _a_ pig this time; I think I 'll get a pair.  You see while
you 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 do
better than--"

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

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

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

I ought to have been at my writing, but it was too late to mention that
now; besides here was my hat still full of peas.  I could not
ungallantly dump them back into her empty pan and quit.  There was
nothing for it but to pod on and stop with one pig.  But my heart was
set on a pair of pigs.  College had just closed (we were having our
17th of June peas) and the joy of the farm was upon me.  I had a cow
and a heifer, eighty-six hens, three kinds of bantams, ten hives of
bees, and two ducks.  I was planning to build a pigeon coop, and had
long talked of turning the nine-acre ridge of sprout land joining my
farm into a milch goat pasture, selling the milk at one dollar a quart
to Boston babies; I had thought somewhat of Belgian hares and black
foxes as a side-line; and in addition to these my heart was set on a
pair of pigs.

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

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

I was sure, I told her, that the Preacher had pigs in mind, for judging
by the number of pig-prohibitions throughout Hebrew literature, they
must have had pigs _constantly_ in mind.  This observation of the early
Hebrew poet and preacher is confirmed, I added, by all the modern
agricultural journals, as well as by all our knowing neighbors.  Even
the Flannigans (an Irish family down the road),--even the Flannigans, I
pointed out, always have two pigs, for all their eight children and his
job tending gate at the railroad crossing.  They have a goat, too.  If
a man with that sort of job can have eight children and a goat and two
pigs, why can't a college professor have a few of the essential,
elementary things, I 'd like to know?

"Do you call your four boys a few?" she asked.

"I don't call my four Flannigan's eight," I replied, "nor my one pig
his two.  Flannigan has the finest pigs on the road.  He has a
wonderful way with a pair of pigs--something he inherited, I suppose,
for I imagine there have been pigs in the Flannigan family ever since--"

"They were kings in Ireland," she put in sweetly.

"Flannigan says," I continued, "that I ought to have two pigs: 'For
shure, a pair o' pags is double wan pag,' says Flannigan--good clear
logic it strikes me, and quite convincing."

She picked up the colander of shelled peas with a sigh.  "We shall want
the new potatoes and fresh salmon to go with these," her mind not on
pigs at all, but on the dinner.  "Can't you dig me a few?"

"I might dig up a few fresh salmon," I replied, "but not any new
potatoes, for they have just got through the ground."

"But if I wanted you to, could n't you?"

"I don't see how I could if there are n't any to dig."

"But won't you go look--dig up a few hills--you can't tell until you
look.  You said you did n't leave the key outside in the door yesterday
when 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 've
planted five hundred cabbages for winter just as if we were a
sauerkraut factory--and the probabilities are we shall go to town this
winter--"

"Go where!" I cried.

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

  _Mullein Hill Sausages
  Made of Little Pigs_

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

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

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

"You need a pig, Dallas, one pig, I am quite sure; but two pigs are
nothing short of the pig business, and that is not what we are living
here on Mullein Hill for."

She went in with her peas and left me with my pigs--or perhaps they
were 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, deep
down and unperceived, except by their wives, perhaps, traits and
tendencies that call for the keeping of a pig.  I think this must be
so, for while she has always said we need the cow or the chickens or
the parsley, she has never spoken so of the pig, it being referred to
invariably as mine, until put into the cellar in a barrel.

The pig as my property, or rather as my peculiar privilege, is utterly
unrelated in her mind to _salt_ pork.  And she is right about that.  No
man needs a pig to put in a barrel.  Everybody knows that it costs less
to buy your pig in the barrel.  And there is little that is edifying
about a barrel of salt pork.  I always try to fill my mind with
cheerful thoughts before descending into the dark of the cellar to fish
a cold, white lump of the late pig out of the pickle.

Not in the uncertain hope of his becoming pork, but for the certain
present joy of his _being_ pork, does a man need a pig.  In all his
other possessions man is always to be blest.  In the pig he has a
constant, present reward: because the pig _is_ and there is no question
as to what he shall be.  He is pork and shall be salt pork, not spirit,
to our deep relief.

Instead of spirit the pig is clothed upon with lard, a fatty, opaque,
snow-white substance, that boils and grows limpid clear and flames with
heat; and while not so volatile and spirit-like as butter, nevertheless
it is one of earth's pure essences, perfected, sublimated, not after
the soul with suffering, but after the flesh with corn and solid
comfort--the most abundant of one's possessions, yet except to the pig
the most difficult of all one's goods to bestow.

The pig has no soul.  I am not so sure of the flower in the crannied
wall, not so sure of the very stones in the wall, so long have they
been, so long shall be; but the pig--no one ever plucked up a pig from
his sty to say,--

  "I hold you here squeal and all, in my hand,
  Little pig--but _if_ I could understand
  What you are, squeal and all, and all in all"--

No poet or philosopher ever did that.  But they have kept pigs.  Here
is Matthew Arnold writing to his mother about _Literature and Dogma_
and poems and--"The two pigs are grown very large and handsome, and
Peter Wood advises us to fatten them and kill our own bacon.  We
consume a great deal of bacon, and Flu complains that it is dear and
not good, so there is much to be said for killing our own; but she does
not seem to like the idea."

"Very large and handsome "--this from the author of

  "The evening comes, the fields are still!"

And here is his wife, again, not caring to have them killed, finding,
doubtless, a better use for them in the pen, seeing that Matthew often
went out there to scratch them.

Poets, I say, have kept pigs, for a change, I think, from their poetry.
For a big snoring pig is not a poem, whatever may be said of a little
roast pig; and what an escape from books and people and parlors (in
this country) is the feeding and littering and scratching of him!  You
put 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 he
grunts, then you scratch him to keep him grunting, yourself reveling in
the sight of the flesh indulged, as you dare not indulge any other
flesh.  You would love to feed the whole family that way; only it would
not be good for them.  You cannot feed even the dog or the horse or the
hens so.  One meal a day for the dog; a limited ration of timothy for
the horse, and _scratch_-feed, for the hens--feed to compel them to
scratch for fear they will run to flesh instead of eggs; and the
children's wedge of pie you sharpen though the point of it pierces your
soul; and the potato you leave off of her plate; and you forgo
your--you get _you_ a medicine ball, I should say, in order to keep
down the fat lest it overlie and smother the soul.

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

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

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




[Illustration: Leafing]

XI

LEAFING

Poets, I said, have kept pigs for an escape from their poetry.  But
keeping pigs is not all prose.  I put my old clothes on to feed him, it
is true; he takes me out behind the barn; but he also takes me one day
in the year out into the woods--a whole day in the woods--with rake and
sacks and hay-rig, and the four boys, to gather him leaves for bedding.

Leafing Day is one of the days in red on the Mullein Hill Calendar; and
of all our days in the woods surely none of them is fresher, more
fragrant, more joyous, and fuller of poetry than the day we go to rake
and sack and bring home the leaves for the pig.

You never went after leaves for the pigs?  Perhaps you never even had a
pig.  But a pig is worth having, if only to see the comfort he takes in
the big bed of dry leaves you give him in the sunny corner of his pen.
And, if leafing had no other reward, the thought of the snoozing,
snoring pig buried to his winking snout in the bed, would give joy and
zest enough to the labor.

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

We jolt across the bumpy field, strike into the back wood-road, and
turn off upon an old stumpy track over which cordwood was carted years
ago.  Here in the hollow at the foot of a high wooded hill the winds
have whirled the oak and maple leaves into drifts almost knee-deep.

We are off the main road, far into the heart of the woods.  We straddle
stumps, bend down saplings, stop while the horse takes a bite of sweet
birch, tack and tip and tumble and back through the tight squeezes
between the trees; and finally, after a prodigious amount of "whoa"-ing
and "oh"-ing and squealing and screeching, we land right side up and so
headed that we can start the load out toward the open road.

You can yell all you want to when you go leafing, yell at every stump
you hit, yell every time a limb knocks off your hat or catches you
under the chin, yell when the horse stops suddenly to browse on the
twigs, and stands you meekly on your head in the bottom of the rig.
You can screech and howl and yell like the wild Indian that you are;
you can dive and wrestle in the piles of leaves, and cut all the crazy
capers you know; for this is a Saturday; these are the wild woods and
the noisy leaves; and who is there looking on besides the mocking jays
and the crows?

The leaves pile up.  The wind blows keen among the tall, naked trees;
the dull clouds hang low above the ridge; and through the cold gray of
the maple swamp below peers the ghostly face of Winter.

You start up the ridge with your rake, and draw down another pile,
thinking, as you work, of the pig.  The thought is pleasing.  The warm
glow all over your body strikes in to your heart.  You rake away as if
it were your own bed you were gathering--as really it is.  He that
rakes for his pig rakes also for himself.  A merciful man is merciful
to his beast, and he that gathers leaves for his pig spreads a blanket
of down over his own winter bed.

Is it to warm my feet on winter nights that I pull on my boots at ten
o'clock and go my round at the barn?  Yet it does warm my feet, through
and through, to look into the stalls and see the cow chewing her cud,
and the horse cleaning up his supper hay, standing to his fetlocks in
his golden bed of new rye-straw; and then, going to the pig's pen, to
hear him snoring louder than the north wind, somewhere in the depths of
his leaf-bed, far out of sight.  It warms my feet, it also warms my
heart.

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

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

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

Listen!  Something piping!  Above the rustle of the leaves we, too,
hear a "fine, plaintive" sound--no, a shrill and ringing little racket,
rather, about the bigness of a penny whistle.

Dropping the rake, we cautiously follow up the call (it seems to speak
out of every tree-trunk!) and find the piper clinging to a twig, no
salamander at all, but a tiny wood-frog.  Pickering's hyla, his little
bagpipe blown almost to bursting as he tries to rally the scattered
summer by his tiny, mighty "skirl."  Take him nose and toes, he is
surely as much as an inch long; not very large to pipe against this
north wind that has been turned loose in the bare woods.

We go back to our raking.  Above us, among the stones of the slope,
hang bunches of Christmas fern; around the foot of the trees we uncover
trailing clusters of gray-green partridge vine, glowing with crimson
berries; we rake up the prince's-pine, pipsissewa, creeping-Jennie, and
wintergreen red with ripe berries--a whole bouquet of evergreens,
exquisite, fairy-like forms that later shall gladden our Christmas
table.

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

Leaves for the pig, and arbutus for us!  We make a clean sweep down the
hillside "jumping" a rabbit from its form under a brush-pile,
discovering where a partridge roosts in a low-spreading hemlock; coming
upon a snail cemetery in a hollow hickory stump; turning up a
yellow-jackets' nest built two thirds underground; tracing the tunnel
of a bobtailed mouse in its 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 we
want, not woodchucks at the bottom of woodchuck-holes."

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

Exciting?  If you can't believe it exciting, hop up on the load, and
let us jog you home.  Swish! bang! thump! tip! turn! joggle! jolt!
Hold on to your ribs.  Pull in your popping eyes.  Look out for the
stump!  Isn't it fun to go leafing?  Is n't it fun to do anything that
your heart does with you?--even though you do it for a pig!

Just watch the pig as we shake out the bags of leaves.  See him caper,
spin on his toes, shake himself, and curl his tail.  That curl is his
laugh.  We double up and weep when we laugh hard; but the pig can't
weep, and he can't double himself up; so he doubles up his tail.  There
is where his laugh comes off, curling and kinking in little spasms of
pure pig joy.

"Boosh!  Boosh!" he snorts, and darts around the pen like a whirlwind,
scattering the leaves in forty ways, to stop short--the shortest
stop!--and fall to rooting for acorns.

He was once a long-tusked boar of the forest, this snow-white,
sawed-off, pug-nose little porker of mine--ages and ages ago.  But he
still remembers the smell of the forest leaves; he still knows the
taste of the acorn-mast; he is still wild pig somewhere deep down
within him.

And we were once long-haired, strong-limbed savages who roamed the
forest for him--ages and ages ago.  And we, too, like him, remember the
smell of the fallen leaves, and the taste of the forest fruits, and of
pig, _roast_ pig.  And if the pig in his heart is still a wild boar, no
less are we at times wild savages in our hearts.

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




[Illustration: The little foxes]

XII

THE LITTLE FOXES

I was picking strawberries down by the woods when some one called out
from the road:--

"Say, ain't they a litter of young foxes somewheres here in the ridges?"

I recognized the man as one of the chronic fox-hunters of the region,
and answered:--

"I 'm sure of it, by the way an old she-fox has pestered my chickens
lately."

"Well, she won't pester them no more.  She 's been trapped and killed.
Any man that would kill a she-fox this time o' year and let her pups
starve to death, he ain't no better than a brute, he ain't.  I 've
hunted two days for 'em; and I 'll hunt till I find 'em."  And he
disappeared into the woods, on my side of the road, upon a quest so
utterly futile, apparently, and so entirely counter to the notion I had
had of the man, that I stopped my picking and followed him up the
ridge, just to see which way a man would go to find a den of suckling
foxes in all the miles and miles of swamp and ledgy woodland that
spread in every direction about him.  I did not see which way he went,
for by the time I reached the crest he had gone on and out of hearing
through the thick sprout-land.  I sat down, however, upon a stump to
think about him, this man of the shoeshop, working his careful way up
and down the bushy slopes, around the granite ledges, across the bogs
and up-grown pastures, into the matted green-brier patches, hour after
hour searching for a hole in the ground a foot wide, for a den of
little foxes that were whimpering and starving because their mother did
not return.

He found them--two miles away in the next town, on the edge of an open
field, near a public road, and directly across from a schoolhouse!  I
don't know how he found them.  But patience and knowledge and love, and
a wild, primitive instinct that making shoes had never taken out of his
primitive nature, helped him largely in his hunt.  He took them, nursed
them back to strength on a bottle, fed them milk and rice until they
could forage for themselves, turned them loose in the woods, and then,
that fall, he shot them one after the other as often as he had a
holiday from the shop, or a moonlight night upon which he could hunt.

But he did not kill all of them.  Seven foxes were shot at my lower
bars last winter.  It is now strawberry time again, and again an old
she-fox lies in wait for every hen that flies over the chicken-yard
fence--which means another litter of young foxes somewhere here in the
ridges.  The line continues, even at the hands of the man with the gun.
For strangely coupled with the desire to kill is the instinct to save,
in human nature and in all nature--to preserve a remnant, that no line
perish forever from the earth.  As the unthinkable ages of geology come
and go, animal and vegetable forms arise, change, and disappear; but
life persists, lines lead on, and in some form many of the ancient
families breathe our air and still find a home on this small and
smaller-growing globe of ours.

And it may continue so for ages yet, with our help and permission.

Wild life is changing more rapidly to-day than ever before, is being
swept faster and faster toward the brink of the world; but it is
cheering to look out of my window, as I write, and see the brown
thrasher getting food for her young out of the lawn, to hear the
scratch of squirrels' feet across the porch, to catch a faint and not
unpleasant odor of skunk through the open window as the breeze blows in
from the woods, and to find, as I found in hoeing my melons early this
morning, the pointed prints of a fox making in a confident and knowing
line toward the chicken-yard.

I have lived some forty years upon the earth (how the old hickory
outside my window mocks me!), and I have seen some startling changes in
wild animal life.  Even I can recall a great flock of snowy herons, or
egrets, that wandered up from the South one year and stayed a while on
the Maurice River marshes, just as, in earlier times, it is recorded
that along the Delaware "the white cranes did whiten the river-bank
like a great snow-drift."  To-day the snowy herons have all but
vanished from the remotest glades of the South; and my friend Finley,
on the trail of the Western plume-hunters, searched in vain for a
single pair of the exquisite birds in the vast tule lakes of Oregon,
where, only a few weeks before his trip, thousands of pairs had nested.
He found heaps of rotting carcasses stripped of their fatally lovely
plumes; he found nests with eggs and dead young, but no live birds; the
family of snowy herons, the whole race, apparently, had been suddenly
swept off the world, annihilated, and was no more.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Year by year the cities spread, the woods and wild places narrow, yet
life holds on.  The fox trots free across my small farm, and helps
himself 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 with
wisdom.  He seems a normal part of civilization; he literally passes in
and out of the city gates, roams at large through my town, and dens
within the limits of my farm.  Enduring, determined, resourceful,
quick-witted, soft-footed, he holds out against a pack of enemies that
keep continually at his heels, and runs in his race the race of all
life, winning for all life, with our help, a long lease yet upon the
earth.

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

There is no sight of Nature more heartening to me than this glimpse of
the fox; no thought of Nature more reassuring than the thought of the
way Reynard holds his own--of the long-drawn, dogged fight that Nature
will put up when cornered and finally driven to bay.  The globe is too
small for her eternally to hold out against man; but with the help of
man, and then in spite of man, she will fight so good a fight that not
for years yet need another animal form perish from the earth.

If I am assuming too much authority, it is because, here in the
remoteness of my small woods where I can see at night the lights of the
distant city, I have personally taken a heartless hand in this
determined attempt to exterminate the fox.  No, I do not raise fancy
chickens in order to feed him.  On the contrary, much as I love to see
him, I keep a double-barreled gun against his coming.  He knows it, and
comes just the same.  At least the gun does not keep him away.  My
neighbors have dogs, but they do not keep him away.  Guns, dogs, traps,
poison--nothing can keep the foxes away.

It must have been about four o'clock the other morning when one of my
children tiptoed into my room and whispered, "Father, there's the old
fox walking around Pigeon-Henny's coop behind the barn."

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

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

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

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

Pushing the muzzle of my double-barreled gun out across the
window-sill, I waited.

Yes, there, through a rift in the fog, stood the fox!  What a shot!
The old rascal cocked his ears toward the house.  All was still.
Quickly under the wire of the coop went his paw, the old hen fluttering
and crying in fresh terror.

Carefully, noiselessly, I swung the muzzle of the gun around on the
window-sill until the bead drew dead upon the thief.  The cow in her
stall beside me did not stir.  I knew that four small boys in the
bedroom window had their eyes riveted upon that fox waiting for me to
fire.  It was a nervous situation, so early in the morning, in the
cold, white fog, and without anything much but slippers on.  Usually,
of course, I shot in boots.

But there stood the fox clawing out my young chickens, and, steadying
the gun as best I could on the moving window-sill, I fired.

That the fox jumped is not to be wondered at.  I jumped myself as both
barrels went off together.  A gun is a sudden thing any time of day,
but so early in the morning, and when everything was wrapped in silence
and the ocean fog, the double explosion was extremely startling.

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

All I could do was to shout at him, which made him run off.

The boys wanted to know if I thought I had killed the hen.  On going
out later I found that I had not even hit the coop--not so bad a shot,
after all, taking into account the size of the coop and the thick,
distorting qualities of the weather.

There is no particular credit to the fox in this, nor do I come in for
any particular credit this time; but the little drama does illustrate
the chances in the game of life, chances that sometimes, usually
indeed, are in favor of the fox.

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

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

One day last autumn I was climbing the steep ridge behind the
mowing-field when I heard a fox-hound yelping over in the hollow
beyond.  Getting cautiously to the top of the ridge, I saw the hound
off below me on the side of the parallel ridge across the valley.  He
was beating slowly along through the bare sprout-land, and evidently
having a hard time holding the trail.  Now and then he would throw his
head up into the air and howl, a long, doleful howl, as if in protest,
begging the fox to stop its fooling and play fair.

The hound was walking, not running, and at a gait almost as deliberate
as his howl.  Round and round in one place he would go, off this way,
off that, then back, until, catching the scent again, or in despair of
ever hitting it (I don't know which), he would stand stock-still and
howl.

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

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

The hound did know what he was about.  Across the valley, up the ridge,
he worked his sure way, while I held my breath at his accuracy.
Striking the woven circle at the top of the ridge, he began to weave in
and out, back and forth, sniffling and whimpering like a tired child,
beating gradually out into a wider and wider circle, and giving the fox
all the rest it could want, before taking up the lead again and
following on down the trail.

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

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

The hound was sent into the woods and was off in a moment on a warm
trail.  But it was not long before the baying ceased, and shortly
after, back came the dog.  The new owner was disappointed; but the next
day he returned and started the dog again, only to have the same thing
happen, the dog returning in a little while with a sheepish air of
having been fooled.  Over and over the trial was made, when, finally,
the dog was taken back to its trainer as worthless.

Then both men came out with the dog, the trainer starting him on the
trail and following on after him as fast as he could break his way
through the woods.  Suddenly, as in the trials before, the baying
ceased, but before the baffled dog had had time to grow discouraged,
the men came up to find him beating distractedly about in a small,
freshly burned area among the bushes, his nose full of strong ashes,
the trail hopelessly lost.  With the help of the men the fox was
dislodged, and the dog carried him on in a course that was to his new
owner's entire satisfaction.

The fox jumped into the ashes to save himself.  Just so have the swifts
left the hollow trees and taken to my chimney, the phoebe to my pigpen,
the swallow to my barn loft, the vireo to my lilac bush, the screech
owls to my apple trees, the red squirrel for its nest to my ice-house,
and the flat-nosed adder to the sandy knoll by my beehives.  I have
taken over from its wild inhabitants fourteen acres in Hingham; but,
beginning with the fox, the largest of my wild creatures, and counting
only what we commonly call "animals" (beasts, birds, and reptiles),
there are dwelling with me, being fruitful and multiplying, here on
this small plot of cultivated earth this June day, some seventy species
of wild things--thirty-six in feathers, fourteen in furs (not reckoning
in the muskrat on the other side of the road), twelve in scales, four
in shells, nine in skins (frogs, newts, salamanders)--seventy-five in
all.

Here is a multiple life going serenely and abundantly on in an
environment whose utter change from the primeval is hardly exaggerated
by phoebe's shift for a nest from a mossy ledge in the heart of the
ancient woods to a joist close up against the hot roof of my pigpen
behind the barn.  From this very joist, however, she has already
brought off two broods since March, one of four and one of five.

As long as pigpens endure, and that shall be as long as the human race
endures, why should not the line of phoebes also endure?  The case of
the fox is not quite the same, for he needs more room than a pigpen;
but as long as the domestic hen endures, if we will but give the fox
half the chance we give to phoebe, he too shall endure.

I had climbed the footpath from the meadow late one autumn evening, and
stood leaning back upon a short hay-fork, looking into the calm
moonlight that lay over the frosted field, and listening to the hounds
baying in the swamp far away to the west of me.  You have heard at
night the passing of a train beyond the mountains; the creak of
thole-pins round a distant curve in the river; the closing of a barn
door somewhere down the valley.  The far-off cry of the hounds was
another such friendly and human voice calling across the vast of the
night.

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

I caught myself picking out the individual voices as they spoke, for an
instant, singly and unmistakable, under the wild excitement of the
drive, then all together, a fiercer, faster chorus as the chase swept
unhindered across the meadows.

What was that?  A twig that broke, some brittle oak leaf that cracked
in the path behind me!  I held my breath as a soft sound of padded feet
came up the path, as something stopped, breathed, came on--as into the
moonlight, 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 legs
could carry them.  But I was standing still, so still that the fox did
not recognize me as anything more than a stump.

No, I was more than a stump; that much he saw immediately.  But how
much more than a stump?

The dogs were coming.  But what was I?  The fox was curious,
interested, and after trying to make me out from a distance, crept
gingerly up and sniffed at my shoes!

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

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

At heart Nature is always just as cool and deliberate, capable always
of taking every advantage.  She is not yet past the panic, and probably
never will be; but no one can watch the change of age-long habits in
the wild animals, their ready adaptability, their amazing
resourcefulness, with any very real fears for what civilization may yet
have in store for them so long as our superior wit is for, instead of
against, them.

I have found myself present, more than once, at an emergency when only
my helping hand could have saved; but the circumstances have seldom
been due to other than natural causes--very rarely man-made.  On the
contrary, man-made conditions out of doors--the multiplicity of fences,
gardens, fields, crops, trees, for the primeval uniformity of forest or
prairie--are all in favor of greater variety and more abundance of wild
life (except for the larger forms), because all of this means more
kinds of foods, more sorts of places for lairs and nests, more paths
and short cuts and chances for escape--all things that help preserve
life.

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

It was a dripping dawn, everything soaked in dew, the leaf edges
beaded, the grass blades bent with wet, so that instead of creeping
into the bushes to wait for the hunt to drive by, I hurried up the road
to the steep gravel bank, climbed it and sat down, well out of sight,
but where I could see a long stretch of the road.

On came the chase.  I kept my eyes down the road at the spot where the
trout brook turns at the foot of the slope, for here the fox, if on the
meadow side of the brook, would be pretty sure to cross--and there he
stood!

I had hardly got my eyes upon the spot, when out through a tangle of
wild grapevine he wound, stopped, glanced up and down, then dug his
heels into the dirt, and flew up the road below me and was gone.

He was a big fellow, but very tired, his coat full of water, his big
brush heavy and dragging with the dripping dew.  He was running a race
burdened with a weight of fur almost equal to the weight of a full suit
of water-soaked clothes upon a human runner; and he struck the open
road as if glad to escape from the wallow of wet grass and thicket that
had clogged his long course.

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

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

Not one of the dogs came back.  Their speed had carried them on beyond
the point where the fox had turned in his tracks and doubled his trail,
on so far that though I waited several minutes, not one of the dogs had
discovered the trick to come back on the right lead.

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




[Illustration: Our calendar]

XIII

OUR CALENDAR

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

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

January 1, 1915

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


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

We shall celebrate Jersey's first birthday September 15, and already on
the calendar the day is red--red, with the deep deep red of our six
hearts!  He is just a dog, a little roughish-haired mixed
Scotch-and-Irish terrier, not big enough yet to wrestle with a woodchuck,
but able to shake our affections as he shakes a rat.  And that is because
I am more than half through with my fourscore years and this is my first
dog!  And the boys--this is their first dog, too, every stray and tramp
dog that they have brought home, having wandered off again.

One can hardly imagine what that means exactly.  Of course, we have had
other things, chickens and pigs and calves, rabbits, turtles, bantams,
the woods and fields, books and kindling--and I have had Her and the four
boys,--the family that is,--till at times, I will say, I have not felt
the need of anything more.  But none of these things is a dog, not even
the boys.  A dog is one of man's primal needs.  "We want a dog!" had been
a kind of family cry until Babe's last birthday.

Some six months before that birthday Babe came to me and said:--

"Father, will you guess what I want for my birthday?"

"A new pair of skates with a key fore and aft," I replied.

"Skates in August!" he shouted in derision.  "Try again."

"A fast-flyer sled with automatic steering-gear and an electric
self-starter and stopper."

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

"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-s
mus--hippopotamus, _that's_ what it is!"

This had always made him laugh, being the way, as I had told him, that I
learned to spell when I went to school; but to-day there was something
deep and solemn in his heart, and he turned away from my lightness with
close-sealed lips, while his eyes, winking hard, seemed suspiciously
open.  I was half inclined to call him back and guess again.  But had not
every one of the four boys been making me guess at that four-legged thing
since they could talk about birthdays?  And were not the conditions of
our living as unfit now for four-legged things as ever?  Besides, they
already had the cow and the pig and a hundred two-legged hens.  More live
stock was simply out of the question at present.

The next day Babe snuggled down beside me at the fire.

"Father," he said, "have you guessed yet?"

"Guessed what?" I asked.

"What I want for my birthday?"

"A nice little chair to sit before the fire in?"

"Horrors! a chair! why, I said a four-legged thing."

"Well, how many legs has a chair?"

"Father," he said, "has a rocking-chair four legs?"

"Certainly."

"Then it must have four feet, hasn't it?"

"Cert--why--I--don't--know exactly about that," I stammered.  "But if you
want a rocking-chair for your birthday, you shall have it, feet or fins,
four legs or two, though I must confess that I don't exactly know,
according to legs, just where a rocking-chair does belong."

"I don't want any chair, nor anything else with wooden legs."

"What kind of legs, then?"

"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!  But
Teddybears have wire legs, I think, instead of bone."

The set look settled once more on his little, square face and the talk
ceased.  But the fight was on.  Day after day, week after week, he had me
guessing--through all the living quadrupeds--through all the fossil
forms--through many that the Lord did not make, but might have made, had
Adam only known enough Greek and Latin to give them names.  Gently,
persistently, he kept me guessing as the far-off day drew near, though
long since my only question had been--What breed?  August came finally,
and a few days before the 24th we started by automobile for New Jersey.

We were speeding along the road for Princeton when all four boys leaned
forward from the back seat, and Babe, close in my ear, said:--

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

"Certainly."

"Have you guessed _what_ yet?"

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

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

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

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

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

"Yes, yes, of course!"

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

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

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

This is Massachusetts, dear reader, and I hail from the melon fields of
Jersey.  Even there a watermelon, to him who is spiritually minded, who,
walking through a field of the radiant orbs (always buy an elongated
ellipsoid for a real melon), hears them singing as they shine--even to
the Jerseyman, I say, the taste of the season's first melon is of
something out of Eden before the fall.  But here in Massachusetts, Ah,
the cold I fight, the drought I fight, the worms I fight, the blight I
fight, the striped bugs I fight, the will-to-die in the very vines
themselves I fight, until at last (once it was the 7th of August!) the
heart inside of one of the green rinds is red with ripeness, and ready to
split at the sight of a knife, answering to the thump with a far-off,
muffled thud,--the family, I say, when that melon is brought in crisp and
cool from the dewy field, is prompt at breakfast, and puts a fervor into
the doxology that morning deeper far than is usual for the mere manna and
quail gathered daily at the grocer's.

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




[Illustration: The Fields of Fodder]

XIV

THE FIELDS OF FODDER

It is doubtless due to early associations, to the large part played by
cornfields in my boyhood, that I cannot come upon one now in these New
England farms without a touch of homesickness.  It was always the
autumn more than the spring that appealed to me as a child; and there
was something connected with the husking and the shocking of the corn
that took deeper hold upon my imagination than any other single event
of the farm year, a kind of festive joy, something solemnly beautiful
and significant, that to this day makes a field of corn in the shock
not so much the substance of earth's bounty as the symbol of earth's
life, or rather of life--here on the earth as one could wish it to
be--lived to the end, and rich in corn, with its fodder garnered and
set in order over a broad field.

Perhaps I have added touches to this picture since the days when I was
a boy, but so far back as when I used to hunt out the deeply fluted
cornstalks to turn into fiddles, it was minor notes I played--the notes
of the wind coming over the field of corn-butts and stirring the loose
blades as it moved among the silent shocks.  I have more than a memory
of mere corn, of heavy-eared stalks cut and shocked to shed the winter
rain: that, and more, as of the sober end of something, the fulfillment
of some solemn compact between us--between me and the fields and skies.

Is this too much for a boy to feel?  Not if he is father to the man!  I
have heard my own small boys, with grave faces, announce that this is
the 21st of June, the longest day of the year--as if the shadows were
already lengthening, even across their morning way.

If my spirit should return to earth as a flower, it would come a
four-o'clock, or a yellow evening primrose, for only the long afternoon
shadows or falling twilight would waken and spread my petals.  No, I
would return an aster or a witch-hazel bush, opening after the corn is
cut, the crops gathered, and the yellow leaves begin to come sighing to
the ground.

At that word "sighing" many trusting readers will lay this essay down.
They have had more than enough of this brand of pathos from their youth
up.

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

Fall rain, fall steadily, heavily, drearily.  Beat off the fading
leaves and flatten them into shapeless patterns on the soaking floor.
Fall and slant and flatten, and, if you will, weep.  Blow wind, through
the creaking branches, blow about the whispering corners; parley there
outside my window; whirl and drive the brown leaves into hiding, and if
I am sad, sigh with me and sob.

May one not indulge in gentle melancholy these closing days of autumn,
and invite the weather in, without being taken to task for it?  One
should no more wish to escape from the sobering influence of the
October days than from the joy of the June days, or the thrill in the
wide wonder of the stars.


  "If winds have wailed and skies wept tears,
    To poet's vision dim,
  'T was that his own sobs filled his ears,
    His weeping blinded him"--

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

There is no month in all the twelve as lovely and loved as October.  A
single, glorious June day is close to the full measure of our capacity
for joy; but the heart can hold a month of melancholy and still ache
for more.  So it happens that June is only a memory of individual days,
while October is nothing less than a season, a mood, a spirit, a soul,
beautiful, pensive, fugitive.  So much is already gone, so many things
seem past, that all the gold of gathered crops and glory on the wooded
hillsides only gild and paint the shadow that sleeps within the very
sunshine of October.

In June the day itself was the great event.  It is not so in October.
Then its coming and going were attended with ceremony and splendor, the
dawn with invisible choirs, the sunset with all the pageantry and pomp
of a regal fete.  Now the day has lessened, and breaks tardily and
without a dawn, and with a blend of shadow quickly fades into the
night.  The warp of dusk runs through even its sunlit fabric from
daybreak to dark.

It is this shadow, this wash of haze upon the flaming landscape, this
screen of mist through which the sunlight sifts, that veils the face of
the fields and softens, almost to sadness, the October mood of things.

For it is the inner mood of things that has changed as well as the
outward face of things.  The very heart of the hills feels it.  The
hush that fell with the first frost has hardly been broken.  The
blackened grass, the blasted vine, have not grown green again.  No new
buds are swelling, as after a late frost in spring.  Instead, the old
leaves on the limbs rattle and waver down; the cornfield is only an
area of stubs and long lines of yellow shocks; and in the corners of
the meadow fence stand clumps of flower-stalks,--joe-pye-weed, boneset,
goldenrod,--bare and already bleaching; and deep within their matted
shade, where the brook bends about an elder bush, a single amber
pendant of the jewel-weed, to which a bumble-bee comes droning on wings
so loud that a little hyla near us stops his pipe to listen!

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

But how sweet is the silence!  To be so far removed from sounds that
one can hear a single cricket and the creeping of a beetle in the
leaves!  Life allows so little margin of silence nowadays.  One cannot
sit down in quiet and listen to the small voices; one is obliged to
stand up--in a telephone booth, a pitiful, two-by-two oasis of silence
in life's desert of confusion and din.  If October brought one nothing
else but this sweet refuge from noises it would be enough.  For the
silence of October, with its peculiar qualities, is pure balm.  There
is none of the oppressive stillness that precedes a severe storm, none
of the ominous hush that falls before the first frost, none of the
death-like lack of sound in a bleak snow-buried swamp or pasture, none
of the awesome majesty of quiet in the movement of the midnight stars,
none of the fearful dumbness of the desert, that muteness without bound
or break, eternal--none of these qualities in the sweet silence of
October.  I have listened to all of these, and found them answering to
mute tongues within my own soul, deep unto deep; but such moods are
rare--moods that can meet death, that can sweep through the heavens
with the constellations, and that can hold converse with the dumb,
stirless desert; whereas the need for the healing and restoration found
in the serene silence of October is frequent.

There are voices here, however, many of them; but all subdued, single,
pure, as when the chorus stops, and some rare singer carries the air
on, and up, and far away till it is only soul.

The joyous confusion and happy tumult of summer are gone; the mating
and singing and fighting are over; the growing and working and
watch-care done; the running even of the sap has ceased; the grip of
the little twigs has relaxed, and the leaves, for very weight of peace,
float off into the air, and all the wood, with empty hands, lies in the
after-summer sun, and dreams.

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

And so I dream.  The woods are at my back, the level meadow and wide
fields of corn-fodder stretch away in front of me to a flaming ridge of
oak and hickory.  The sun is behind me over the woods, and the lazy air
glances with every gauzy wing and flashing insect form that skims the
sleepy meadow.  But there is an unusual play of light over the grass, a
glinting of threads that enmesh the air as if the slow-swinging wind
were weaving gossamer of blown silk from the steeple-bush spindles
through the slanting reeds of the sun.

It is not the wind that weaves; it is a multitude of small spiders.
Here is one close to my face, out at the tip of a slender grass-stem,
holding on with its fore legs and kicking out backward with its hind
legs a tiny skein of web off into the air.  The threads stream and sway
and lengthen, gather and fill and billow, and tug at their anchorage
till, caught in the dip of some wayward current, they lift the little
aeronaut from his hangar and bear him away through the sky.

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

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

Yet no such ship would dare put to sea except in this soft and sunny
weather.  The autumn seeds are sailing too--the pitching parachutes of
thistle and fall dandelion and wild lettuce, like fleets of tiny yachts
under sail--a breeze from a cut-over ridge in the woods blowing almost
cottony with the soft down of the tall lettuce that has come up thick
in the clearing.

As I watch the strowing of the winds, my melancholy slips away.  One
cannot lie here in the warm but unquickening sun, and see this sower
crossing meadow and cornfield without a vision of waking life, of
fields again all green where now stands the fodder, of woods all full
of song as soon as this sowing and the sleeping of the seeds are done.
The autumn wind goeth forth to sow, and with the most lavish of hands.
He wings his seeds, and weights his seeds, he burrs them, rounds them,
and angles them; they fly and fall, they sink and swim, they stick and
shoot, they pass the millstones of the robins' gizzards for the sake of
a chance to grow.  They even lie in wait for me, plucking me by the
coat-sleeve, fastening upon my trousers' leg and holding on until I
have walked with them into my very garden.  The cows are forced to
carry them, the squirrel to hide them, the streams to whirl them on
their foaming drift into places where no bird or squirrel or wayward
breeze would go.  Not a corner within the horizon but will get its
needed seed, not a nook anywhere, from the wind-swept fodder-field to
the deepest, darkest swamp, but will come to life and flower again with
the coming spring.

The leaves are falling, the birds are leaving, most of them having
already gone.  Soon I shall hear the bugle notes of the last guard as
the Canada geese go over, headed swift and straight for the South.  And
yonder stands the fodder, brown and dry, the slanting shocks securely
tied against the beating rains.  How can one be melancholy when one
knows the meaning of the fodder, when one is able to find in it his
faith in the seasons, and see in it the beauty and the wisdom which has
been built into the round of the year?

To him who lacks this faith and understanding let me give a serene
October day in the woods.  Go alone, lie down upon a bank where you can
get a large view of earth and sky.  "One seems to get nearer to nature
in the early spring days," says Mr. Burroughs.  I think not, not if by
nearer you mean closer to the heart and meaning of things.  "All
screens are removed, the earth everywhere speaks directly to you; she
is not hidden by verdure and foliage."  That is true; yet for most of
us her lips are still dumb with the silence of winter.  One cannot come
close to bare, cold earth.  There is only one flat, faded expression on
the face of the fields in March; whereas in October there is a settled
peace and sweetness over all the face of Nature, a fullness and a
non-withholding in her heart that makes communication natural and
understanding easy.

The sap is sinking in the trees, the great tides of life have turned,
but so slowly do they run these soft and fragrant days that they seem
almost still, as at flood.  A blue jay is gathering acorns overhead,
letting one drop now and then to roll out of sight and be planted under
the mat of leaves.  Troops of migrating warblers flit into and through
the trees, talking quietly among themselves as they search for food,
moving all the while--and to a fixed goal, the far-off South.
Bob-white whistles from the fodder-field; the odor of ripened fox
grapes is brought with a puff of wind from across the pasture; the
smell of mint, of pennyroyal, and of sweet fern crisping in the sun.
These are not the odors of death; but the fragrance of life's very
essence, of life ripened and perfected and fit for storing till another
harvest comes.  And these flitting warblers, what are they but another
sign of promise, another proof of the wisdom which is at the heart of
things?  And all this glory of hickory and oak, of sumac and creeper,
of burning berries on dogwood and ilex and elder--this sunset of the
seasons--but the preparation for another dawn?

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

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

No, the thought of November does not disturb me.  There is one glory of
the 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 the
months and seasons.  And if I watch closely I shall see that not only
are the birds leaving, but the muskrats are building their winter
lodges, the frogs are bedding, the buds putting on their thick, furry
coats--life everywhere preparing for the cold.  I need to take the same
precaution,--even in my heart.  I will take a day out of October, a day
when the woods are aflame with color, when the winds are so slow that
the spiders are ballooning, and lying where I can see them ascending
and the parachute seeds go drifting by, I will watch until my eyes are
opened to see larger and plainer things go by--the days with the round
of labor until the evening; the seasons with their joyous waking, their
eager living; their abundant fruiting, and then their sleeping--for
they must needs sleep.  First the blade, then the ear, after that the
full corn in the ear, and after that the field of fodder.  If so with
the corn and the seasons, why not so with life?  And what of it all
could be fairer or more desirable than its October?--to lie and look
out over a sunlit meadow to a field of fodder cut and shocked against
the winter with my own hands!




[Illustration: Going back to town]

XV

GOING BACK TO TOWN

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

She set the three tin lunch-boxes (two for the four boys and one for
me) on the back of the stove and stood looking a moment at them.

"Are you getting tired of spreading us bread and butter?" I asked.

She made no reply.

"If you don't put us up our comforts this year, how are we going to
dispose of all that strawberry jam and currant jelly?"

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

"An enormous price," I affirmed solemnly.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For an automobile is not a snow-plough, however much gasoline you give
it.  Time was when I rode a snow-plough and enjoyed it, as my Neighbor
Jonas rides and enjoys his, feeling that he is plenty fast enough, as
indeed he is, his sense of safety on the way, the absolute certainty
(so far as there can be human certainty) of his arriving sometime,
being compensation enough for the loss of those sensations of speed
induced across one's diaphragm and over one's epidermis by the
automobile.

Speeding is a disease of the hair follicles, I think, and the great
hallucination of haste under which we move and try to have a being is
seated in the muscles of the diaphragm.  Have I not found myself
rushing for a hundred places by automobile that I never should have
started for at all by hayrick or snow-plough, and thus had saved myself
that time wholly?  Space is Time's tail and we can't catch it.  The
most we can catch, with the speediest car, is a sight of its tip going
around the corner ahead.

Speed is contagious, and I fear that I have it.  I moved away here into
Hingham to escape it, but life in the Hingham hills is not far enough
away to save a man from all that passes along the road.  The wind, too,
bloweth where it listeth, and when there is infection on it, you can't
escape by hiding in Hingham--not entirely.  And once the sporulating
speed germs get into your 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 for
four; a chill at four and a fever for six--eight--twelve, just like
malaria!

We all have it, all but Neighbor Jonas.  He has instead a "stavin'"
good mare by the name of Bill.  Bill is speedy.  She sprang, years ago,
from fast stock, as you would know if you held the cultivator behind
her.  When she comes to harrow the garden, Jonas must needs come with
her to say "Whoa!" all the way, and otherwise admonish and exhort her
into remembering that the cultivator is not a trotting-sulky, and that
a row of beets is not a half-mile track.  But the hard highways hurt
Bill's feet, so that Jonas nowadays takes every automobile's dust, and
none too sweetly either.

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

"I take the eggs down to the store every two weeks and get a shave; but
I don't need a car much, havin' Bill," he replied, smashing a vicious
greenhead on Bill's withers that was keeping her mixed up with the
traces and the teeth of the harrow.  "Besides, they 're skittish,
nervous things compared with a hoss.  What I 'd like is something
neither one nor t'other--a sort of cross between an auto and Bill."

"Why not get a Ford car, then," I asked, "with a cultivator attachment?
It would n't step on as many hills in the row as Bill does, and I think
it would beat Bill on the road."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here in the meadow I was exposed to the full force of the sweeping
gale, and here I realized for the first time that this was the great
storm of the winter, one of the supreme passages of the year, and one
of the glorious physical fights of a lifetime.

On a prairie, or in the treeless barrens and tundras of the vast,
frozen North, a fight like this could have but one end.  What must the
wild polar night be like!  What the will, the thrill of men like Scott
and Peary who have fought these forces to a standstill at the very
poles!  Their craft, their cunning, their daring, their imagination!
The sway, the drive, the divine madness of such a purpose!  A living
atom creeping across the ice-cap over the top of the world!  A human
mote, so smothered in the Arctic dark and storm, so wide of the utmost
shore of men, by a trail so far and filled and faint that only God can
follow!

It is not what a man does, but what he lives through doing it.  Life
may be safer, easier, longer, and fuller of possessions in one place
than another.  But possessions do not measure life, nor years, nor
ease, nor safety.  Life in the Hingham hills in winter is wretchedly
remote at times, but nothing happens to me all day long in Boston to be
compared 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 the
world, nor the loveliness of night, nor the fearful majesty of such a
winter storm.

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

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

But there is a largeness to the quality of country life, a freshness
and splendor as constant as the horizon and a very part of it.

Take a day anywhere in the year: that day in March--the day of the
first frogs, when spring and winter meet; or that day in the fall--the
day of the first frost, when autumn and winter meet; or that day in
August--the day of the full-blown goldenrod, when summer and autumn
meet--_these_, together with the days of June, and more especially that
particular day in June when you can't tell earth from heaven, when
everything is life and love and song, and the very turtles of the pond
are moved from their lily-pads to wander the upland slopes to lay--the
day when spring and summer meet!

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

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

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

or the blizzard?

But going back to town, as she intimated, concerns the children quite
as much as me.  They travel eight miles a day to get to school, part of
it on foot and part of it by street car--and were absent one day last
year when the telephone wires were down and we thought there would be
no school because of the snow.  They might not have missed that one day
had we been in the city, and I must think of that when it comes time to
go back.  There is room for them in the city to improve in spelling and
penmanship too, vastly to improve.  But they could n't have half so
much fun there as here, nor half so many things to do, simple,
healthful, homely, interesting things to do, as good for them as books
and food and sleep--these last things to be had here, too, in great
abundance.

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

No head is turned; not a squeeze is missed--this is _business_ here in
the stall,--but as the car stops behind the scene, Babe calls--

"Hello, Father!"

"Hello, Babe!"

"Three teats done," calls Mansie, his head down, butting into the old
cow's flank.  "You go right in, we 'll be there.  She has n't kicked
but once!"

Perhaps that is n't a good thing for those two little boys to
do--watering, feeding, brushing, milking the cow on a winter night in
order to save me--and loving to!  Perhaps that is n't a good thing for
me to see them doing, as I get home from the city on a winter night!

But I am a sentimentalist and not proof at all against two little boys
milking, who are liable to fall into the pail.

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

"How did she come up?" calls Beebum as he opens the house door for me,
his cheeks still glowing with the cold and exercise.

"Did we give you wide enough swing at the bend?" cries Bitsie, seizing
the bag of bananas.

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

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

"Bad night in Boston!" I exclaim.  "Trains late, cars stalled--streets
blocked with snow.  I 'm mighty glad to be out here a night like this."

"Woof!  Woof!"--And Babe and Pup are at the kitchen door with the pail
of milk, shaking themselves free from snow.

"Where is Mansie?" his mother asks.

"He just ran down to have a last look at his chickens."

We sit down to dinner, but Mansie does n't come.  The wind whistles
outside, the snow sweeps up against the windows,--the night grows
wilder and fiercer.

"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 here
in a moment."

The meal goes on.

"Will you go out and see what is the matter with the child?" she asks,
the look of anxiety changing to one of alarm on her face.

As I am rising there is a racket in the cellar and the child soon comes
blinking into the lighted dining-room, his hair dusty with snow, his
cheeks blazing, his eyes afire.  He slips into his place with just a
hint of apology about him and reaches for his cup of fresh, warm milk.

He is twelve years old.

"What does this mean, Mansie?" she says.

"Nothing."

"You are late for dinner.  And who knows what had happened to you out
there in the trees a night like this.  What were you doing?"

"Shutting up the chickens."

"But you did shut them up early in the 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 big
hens--a little one and a big one, a little one and a big one, to keep
the little ones warm; and it took a lot of time."

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

Shall I take them back to the city for the winter--away from their
chickens, and cow and dog and pig and work-bench and haymow and
fireside, and the open air and their wild neighbors and the wilder
nights 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 not
spoil the poet in them.

"Make our boy interested in natural history if you can.  It is better
than games.  Keep him in the open air.  Above all, you must guard him
against indolence.  Make him a strenuous man.  The great God has called
me.  Take comfort in that I die in peace with the world and myself and
not afraid"--from the last letter of Captain Scott to his wife, as he
lay watching the approach of death in the Antarctic cold.  His own end
was nigh, but the infant son, in whose life he should never take a
father's part, what should be his last word for him?

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

Those are solemn words, and they carry a message of deep significance.
I have watched my own boys; I recall my own boyhood; and I believe the
words are true.  So thoroughly do I believe in the physical and moral
value of the outdoors for children, the open fields and woods, that
before 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 same
fields with them; here they shall play as the young foxes and
woodchucks play, and on the same bushy hillsides with them--summer and
winter.

Games are natural and good.  It is a stick of a boy who won't be "it."
But there are better things than games, more lasting, more developing,
more educating.  Kittens and puppies and children play; but children
should have, and may have, other and better things to do than puppies
and kittens can do; for they are not going to grow up into dogs and
cats.

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

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

We saw this and that, single deep impressions, that I shall always
remember.  But better than any single sight, any sweet sound or smell,
was the sense of companionship with my human guide, and the sense that
I loved

    "not man the less, but nature more,
  From these our interviews."

If we _do_ move into town this winter, it won't be because the boys
wish to go.




[Illustration: The Christmas tree]

XVI

THE CHRISTMAS TREE

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

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

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

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

"But we 've marked it!"

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

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

"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 Eve
with their tree uncut.  They had hardly gone, however, when I took the
axe and the lantern (for safety) and started up the ridge for the
devoted tree.  I found it; got it on my shoulder; and long after nine
o'clock--as snowy and as weary an old Chris as ever descended a
chimney--came dragging in the tree.

We got to bed late that night--as all parents ought on the night before
Christmas; but Old Chris himself, soundest of sleepers, never slept
sounder!  And what a Christmas Day we had.  What a tree it was!  Who
got it?  How?  No, old Chris did n't bring it--not when two of the boys
came floundering in from a walk that afternoon saying they had tracked
me from the cellar door clear out to the tree-stump--where they found
my axe!

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

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

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


I cannot hear the angels, nor see, for the flames of burning cities,
their shining ranks descend the sky.

  "No war, or battle's sound,
  Was heard the world around;
  The idle spear and shield were high uphung"

on that first Christmas Eve.  What has happened since then--since I was
a child?--since last Christmas, when I still believed in Christmas, and
sang with the choir, "Noel!  Noel!"?

But I am confusing sentiment and faith.  If I cannot sing peace on
earth, I still believe in it; if I cannot hear the angels, I know that
the Christ was born, and that Christmas is coming.  It will not be a
very merry Christmas; but it shall be a most significant, most solemn,
most holy Christmas.

The Yule logs, as the Yule-tide songs, will be fewer this year.  Many a
window, bright with candles a year ago, will be darkened.  There will
be no goose at the Cratchits', for both Bob and Master Cratchit have
gone to the front.  But Tiny Tim is left, and the Christ Child is left,
and my child is left, and yours--even your dear dreamchild "upon the
tedious shores of Lethe" that always comes back at Christmas.  It takes
only one little child to make Christmas--one little child, and the
angels who companion him, and the shepherds who come to see him, and
the Wise Men who worship him and bring him gifts.

We can have Christmas, for unto us again, as truly as in Bethlehem of
Judea, a child is born on whose shoulders shall be the government and
whose 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 the
sake of the little child that we must become before we can enter into
the Kingdom of Heaven.  It is neither kings nor kaisers, but a little
child that shall lead us finally.  And long after the round-lipped
cannons have ceased to roar, we shall hear the Christmas song of the
Angels.

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

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

I hope it snows.




THE END











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