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.



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!



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.



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