The Magical Chance

by Dallas Lore Sharp

“‘Say it with flowers!’ snapped our driver, wheeling about for the other fork.

“At the turn I looked back. There stood our guide in the road, his right foot still in the air, I think; and there—though it is several years since, he may still be standing—one foot planted on the road to Scituate, the other foot resting on the hub of the wheel that should have been on the road to Hanover.”

The man in the road knew that this road ran to Scituate. He lived on it. Had they asked him: “Master, which is the Great Commandment?” he had answered: “Take this road for Scituate.” For were they not duck hunting in Hanover? Then what profounder error could they have been in than on the road to Scituate!

But most people go that way for Hanover. Every young writer I know hankers to get his Hanover ducks out of Scituate, as if, failing to get ducks, he might get Scituate; novelty, the mere novelty of gunning in Scituate when the ducks are in Hanover, making the best sort of “copy.”

Is it some new thing that we should search out, or some deeper, truer thing? Must we travel, or may we stay at home? Locomotion is certainly a curse to literature. No one nowadays stays long enough in his own place to know it and himself in it, which is about all that he can know well enough to express. Let the writer stay at home. Drummers, actors, circus-men, and Satan are free to go up and down the earth. And these seem to be writing most of our books.

For some years, now, I, also, have been going to and fro and up and down in the earth thinking that I might find some better place than Hingham. I have just returned from Wausau, Wisconsin, where they have a very hard red granite, and a deep green granite, both of them the loveliest tombstone stuff that, I think, I ever saw. Certainly they are superior to our seam-face Hingham granite for tombstones. Up to the time of my Wausau visit, I had never given much thought to tombstones; but it shows how one’s thought expands with travel, and how easily Wausau may surpass Hingham, not alone in gravestones, but in other, even in literary, materials.

But Hingham has one thing in the line of gravestones not found at all in Wausau: I mean the boulders, great roundish glacial boulders, gray granite boulders, old and gentle and mossy-grown, which lie strewn over our hilly pastures among the roses and the hardhack and the sweetfern, ready to be rolled to the tomb, and fit for any poet’s tomb. When that shy spirit and bird-lover, Bradford Torrey, native of my neighbor town of Weymouth, died in far-off California, he left but a single simple request: that he be brought back to his birthplace for burial, and that a Weymouth boulder be found and rolled up to mark his grave. Were mine not Hingham boulders I would take one out of my wall, the one which serves as a gatepost, and, with a yoke of Weymouth oxen, would draw it to Bradford Torrey’s tomb, a tribute from Hingham to Weymouth, and a gift out of the heart of one who knows and loves “The Foot-Path Way,” “A Rambler’s Lease,” and “A World of Green Hills.”

Perhaps one must needs go to California in order to come by this deep desire for Weymouth. Then let him go early. For if he is to write “The Natural History of Weymouth,” or of Selborne, he must return early and stay a long time. Thoreau has been criticized for writing of Nature as if she were born and brought up in Concord. So she was. Can one not see all of the world out of the “Window in Thrums”?—that is, all of the world of Thrums, which is all of the world, and just the world, one goes to Thrums to see? “I have traveled a great deal in Concord,” says Thoreau.

This brings me back to Hingham. I wish that I could write “The Natural History of Hingham”! A modest desire! There can never be another Gilbert White—but not for lack of birds and beasts in Hingham. Were I a novelist I would write a “Cranford”—and I could! I would call it “Hingham,” not “Main Street,” though that is the name of perhaps the longest street in Hingham. But there are many other streets in Hingham, and all kinds of interesting people.

And here I am on Mullein Hill, Hingham, with all of these streets, and all of these people, and woodchucks a plenty to write about—and planning this day a trip to California! I might have been the author of a recent book whose theme and sub-title read: “In the plains and the rolling country there is room for the individual to skip and frolic, but all the peaks are preëmpted.” Come down from Mullein Hill; get out of Hingham; go West, young writer, as far as California; you shall find room to skip and frolic on the plains out there!