One might never leave Ur were he not seeking a city. And one must never find his city else he might cease his seeking. I do not know how old Abraham was when he set out from Ur of the Chaldees. I left Haleyville at the age of eight. I have only lately come to Hingham, having got in on the wrong side of the railroad track some twenty years ago. (If one is really to arrive in Hingham, one must come in with one’s ancestors, and more than twenty years before.) I say, I was eight when I left Haleyville; that I have hardly yet arrived in Hingham; but all the way from Haleyville to Hingham, and all the way from Hingham to—Heaven, dare I say?—there has been, and there shall be, held out, in both of Life’s hands to me, the magical chance of escape.
Did I start out from Hingham to find the frontier? That was wrong. I will start back for Hingham. Hingham is the frontier. So was Haleyville. So will Heaven be. Life with the earth goes round, not forward, except to complete a circuit established when the stars were fixed, an orbit that all the forces of Heaven and human intelligence have been unable to warp. The only variation or shadow of new turning Earth herself can look forward to is from collision with some mad comet, which, if she lasts long enough, may happen possibly within fifteen million years—a square head-on smash it may be, or only a side-swipe with a severe shaking up—and then fifteen million years more of steady turning. Things outside are rather hard and fast despite appearances, and we who are parts of this even scheme, we find that our uprisings and downsittings have never varied much from rule, nor are liable to.
We are, I repeat, what we always were, and so are things what they always were, though they look different. So is life what it always was for adventures and frontiers.
The wild frontier, like the hunted fox, has doubled on its trail, that is all. Romance has slipped out of the woods into the deeper places of the city; Adventure has turned commuter; and here are the three to companion life, as they ever have—the Athos, Porthos, and Aramis to a bebundled D’Artagnan. And already it is more than “Twenty Years Since.”
Twenty years, or a hundred years—
“The year’s at the spring.”
If you do not find your fill of adventure with Davy Balfour in Appin, come down with him to Dean—to Edinburgh, and you shall see the face of such danger “in the midst of what they call the safety of a town” as may shake you, too, “beyond experience.”
If you don’t find the frontier in the daylight, wait for the dark. Every night is a fresh frontier. There are no landmarks of the day but are blotted out by the dark as the lines are sponged in the wake of a steamer’s keel. On the shortest night of this year wild rabbits were in my garden, fox-hounds were baying beyond the quarries, and through the thin early mist of the dawn we were all at the window watching a wild doe behind the barn. She nipped the clover nervously, twitched her tail, pricked her ears (for the day was approaching), and took the high wire fence at a bound. She was as wild and free as the wind.
A few Sunday nights ago I was at church when the minister announced a series of evening sermons for young people, and, to my utter astonishment, his first talk was to be “Against Sowing Wild Oats.” I was greatly tempted to ask him if he intended to prevent his young people from doing any more farming. If they couldn’t sow wild oats, what kind of oats could they sow? Did he ever see any tame oats? Those preachers imagine a vain thing who think we ever cease to sow wild oats (at least, there is many a late crop, as Thackeray says). The truth is there are no oats but wild ones.
I do not know what seed catalogue you order your garden seeds out of; I get mine out of one marked “Honest Seeds”; it is assuring to have an order-book of this sort plainly stamped “honest” on the cover. In this honest-seed catalogue for the current year the seedsman, on page 56, is describing his oats. Let the preacher on wild oats note with critical care the terms of this description. There is something theological, at least, revivalistic, about them. It is the only oat described in the catalogue; and it would be the only oat to plant in all the world, if it were, as it is described, a “Regenerated Select Swedish Oat.” A “regenerated” (that is Methodist) “select” (that is Presbyterian) oat! But read on through this catalogue, and you will find that every seed and tuber from artichoke to zinnia has been to a revival since last summer and hit the “sawdust trail.” Great revivalists are the seedsmen! Their work, however, is not permanent. For they know, and we all know, that every regenerated select Swedish oat in their bins is a backslider at heart, as wild as the wild ass of the wilderness that scorneth the crying of the driver.