t he might quote next
and _miss_ from the landscape. The spires were indeed there (may
neither one of them now be struck by lightning!); but what a terrible
memory the man has! Had he come from Dubuque to prove me--

The spires, however, seemed to satisfy him; he could steer by them; and
to my great relief, he did not demand a chart to each of the wonders of
Mullein Hill--my thirty-six woodchuck holes, etc., etc., nor ask, as
John Burroughs did, for a sight of the fox that performed in one of my
books somewhat after the manner of modern _literary_ foxes. Literary
foxes! One or another of us watches this Hilltop day and night with a
gun for literary foxes! I want no pilgrims from Dubuque, no
naturalists from Woodchuck Lodge, poking into the landscape or under
the stumps for spires and foxes and boa constrictors and things that
they cannot find outside the book. I had often wondered what I would
do if such visitors ever came. Details, I must confess, might on many
pages be difficult to verify; but for some years now I have faithfully
kept my four boys here in the woods to prove the reality of my main
theme.

This morning, with heaps of gravel in the yard, the hilltop looked
anything but like the green and fruitful mountain of the book, still
less like a way station between anywhere and _Concord_! And as for
myself--it was no wonder he said to me,--

"Now, sir, please go on with your teaming. I ken the lay of the land
about Mullein Hill

"'Whether the simmer kindly warms
Wi' life and light,
Or winter howls in gusty storms
The lang, dark night.'"

But I did not go on with the teaming. Gravel is a thing that will
wait. Here it lies where it was dumped by the glaciers of the Ice Age.
There was no hurry about it; whereas pilgrims and poets from Dubuque
must be stopped as they pass. So we sat down and talked--of books and
men, of poems and places, but mostly of books,--books I had written,
and other books--great books "whose dwelling is the light of setting
suns." Then we walked--over the ridges, down to the meadow and the
stream, and up through the orchard, still talking of books, my strange
visitor, whether the books were prose or poetry, catching up the volume
somewhere with a favorite passage, and going on--reading on--from
memory, line after line, pausing only to repeat some exquisite turn, or
to comment upon some happy thought.

Not one book was he giving me, but many. The tiny leather