The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Hills of Hingham, by Dallas Lore Sharp

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Title: The Hills of Hingham

Author: Dallas Lore Sharp

Release Date: June 23, 2006 [EBook #18664]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HILLS OF HINGHAM ***

Produced by Al Haines

THE HILLS OF HINGHAM

BY

DALLAS LORE SHARP

WITH ILLUSTRATIONS

BOSTON AND NEW YORK

HOUGHTON MIFFLIN COMPANY

The Riverside Press Cambridge

COPYRIGHT, 1916, BY DALLAS LORE SHARP

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED

_Published April 1916_

TO THOSE WHO

"_Enforst to seek some shelter nigh at hand_"

HAVE FOUND THE HILLS OF HINGHAM

PREFACE

The is not exactly the book I thought it was going to be--though I can
say the same of its author for that matter. I had intended this book
to set forth some features of the Earth that make it to be preferred to
Heaven as a place of present abode, and to note in detail the peculiar
attractions of Hingham over Boston, say,--Boston being quite the best
city on the Earth to live in. I had the book started under the title
"And this Our Life"

. . . exempt from public haunt,
Finds tongues in trees,"

--when, suddenly, war broke out, the gates of Hell swung wide open into
Belgium, and Heaven began to seem the better place. Meanwhile, a
series of lesser local troubles had been brewing--drouth, caterpillars,
rheumatism, increased commutation rates, more college themes,--more
than I could carry back and forth to Hingham,--so that as the writing
went on Boston began to seem, not a better place than Hingham, but a
nearer place, somehow, and more thoroughly sprayed.

And all this time the book on Life that I thought I was writing was
growing chapter by chapter into a defense of that book--a defense of
Life--my life here by my fireside with my boys and Her, and the garden
and woodlot and hens and bees, and days off and evenings at home and
books to read, yes, and books to write--all of which I had taken for
granted at twenty, and believed in with a beautiful faith at thirty,
when I moved out here into what was then an uninfected forest.

That was