ith their
adventure possible? Why, there is nothing ailing the man of forty
except that he now is neither young nor old, nor rich, the chances are;
nor a dead failure either, but just an average man; yet he is one of
God's people, if the Philistines were (He brought them from Caphtor)
and the Syrians (those He brought from Kir). The man of forty has a
right to so much of the Promised Land as a hill in Hingham. But he is
afraid to possess it because it is so far from work and friends and
lighted streets. He is afraid of the dark and of going off to sit down
upon a stump for converse with himself. He is afraid he won't get his
work done. If his work were planting beans, he would get none planted
surely while on the stump; but so he might be saved the ungracious task
of giving away his surplus beans to bean-ridden friends for the summer.
A man, I believe, can plant too many beans. He might not finish the
freshman themes either. But when was the last freshman theme ever
done? Finish them if he can, he has only baked the freshmen into
sophomores, and so emptied the ovens for another batch of dough. He
shall never put a crust on the last freshman, and not much of a crust
on the last sophomore either, the Almighty refusing to cooeperate with
him in the baking. Let him do the best he can, not the most he can,
and quit for Hingham and the hills where he can go out to a stump and
sit down.

College students also are a part of that world which can be too much
with us, cabbages, too, if we are growing cabbages. We don't do
over-much, but we are over-busy. We want too much. Buy a little hill
in Hingham, and even out here, unless you pray and go apart often to
your stump, your desire will be toward every hill in sight and the
valleys between.

According to the deed my hill comprises "fourteen acres more or less"
of an ancient glacier, a fourteen-acre heap of unmitigated gravel,
which now these almost fourteen years I have been trying to clear of
stones, picking, picking for a whole Stone Age, and planning daily to
buy the nine-acre ridge adjoining me which is gravelier than mine. By
actual count we dumped five hundred cartloads of stones into the
foundation of a porch when making over the house recently--and still I
am out in the garden picking, picking, living in the Stone Age still,
and planning to prolong the stay by nine acres more that are worse than
these I now have, nine times worse for stones!

I shall neve