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,—