ville they
understand the language of the hills.

Jimville does not know a great deal about the crust of the earth, it
prefers a "hunch." That is an intimation from the gods that if you go
over a brown back of the hills, by a dripping spring, up Coso way, you
will find what is worth while. I have never heard that the failure of
any particular hunch disproved the principle. Somehow the rawness of the
land favors the sense of personal relation to the supernatural. There is
not much intervention of crops, cities, clothes, and manners between you
and the organizing forces to cut off communication. All this begets
in Jimville a state that passes explanation unless you will accept an
explanation that passes belief. Along with killing and drunkenness,
coveting of women, charity, simplicity, there is a certain indifference,
blankness, emptiness if you will, of all vaporings, no bubbling of the
pot,--it wants the German to coin a word for that,--no bread-envy, no
brother-fervor. Western writers have not sensed it yet; they smack the
savor of lawlessness too much upon their tongues, but you have these
to witness it is not mean-spiritedness. It is pure Greek in that it
represents the courage to sheer off what is not worth while. Beyond
that it endures without sniveling, renounces without self-pity, fears no
death, rates itself not too great in the scheme of things; so do beasts,
so did St. Jerome in the desert, so also in the elder day did gods.
Life, its performance, cessation, is no new thing to gape and wonder at.

Here you have the repose of the perfectly accepted instinct which
includes passion and death in its perquisites. I suppose that the end of
all our hammering and yawping will be something like the point of view
of Jimville. The only difference will be in the decorations.

MY NEIGHBOR'S FIELD

It is one of those places God must have meant for a field from all
time, lying very level at the foot of the slope that crowds up against
Kearsarge, falling slightly toward the town. North and south it is
fenced by low old glacial ridges, boulder strewn and untenable. Eastward
it butts on orchard closes and the village gardens, brimming over into
them by wild brier and creeping grass. The village street, with its
double row of unlike houses, breaks off abruptly at the edge of the
field in a footpath that goes up the streamside, beyond it, to the
source of waters.

The field is not greatly esteemed of the town, not bein