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 coöperate 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