The Hills of Hingham

by Dallas Lore Sharp

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.