The Hills of Hingham

by Dallas Lore Sharp

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."

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.