re the sharing stops,
and consequently there the returns stop. He gives to the soil and the
soil gives back, thirty, sixty, an hundredfold. What if he should give
to the skies as well?--to the wild life that dwells with him on his
land?--to the wild flowers that bank his meadow brook?--to the trees
that cover his pasture slopes? Would they, like the soil, give
anything back?

Off against the sky to the south a succession of his rounded slopes
shoulder their way from the woods out to where the road and the brook
wind through. They cannot be tilled; the soil is too scant and
gravelly; but they are lovely in their gentle forms, and still lovelier
in their clumps of mingled cedars and gray birches, scattered dark and
sharply pointed on the blue of the sky, and diffuse, and soft, and
gleaming white against the hillside's green. I cannot help seeing them
from my windows, cannot help lingering over them--could not, rather;
for recently my neighbor (and there never was a better neighbor) sent a
man over those hills with an axe, and piled the birches into cords of
snowy firewood.

It was done. I could not help it, but in my grief I went over and
spoke to him about it. He was sorry, and explained the case by
saying,--

"Well, if there's one kind of tree I hate more than another, it's a
gray birch."

We certainly need a rural uplift. We need an urban uplift, too, no
doubt, for I suppose "beans are beans" in Boston, just as they are here
in Hingham. But it does seem the more astonishing that in the country,
where the very environment is poetry, where companionship with living
things is constant, where even the labor of one's hands is cooeperation
with the divine forces of nature--the more astonishing, I say, that
under these conditions life should so often be but bare existence, mere
beans.

There are many causes for this, one of them being an unwillingness to
share largely with the whole of nature. "I 'll go halves with the
soil," said my neighbor; but he did not sign a lease to run his farm on
shares with the "varmints," the fox, which stole his fine rooster, on
this particular occasion.

But such a contract is absolutely necessary if one is to get out of
farm life--out of any life--its flowers and fragrance, as well as its
pods and beans. And, first, one must be convinced, must acknowledge to
one's self, that the flower and fragrance are needed in life, are as
useful as pods and beans. A row of sweet peas is