rom public benefits, blessing
ourselves, every time it snows on Saturday, that we are here and not
there for our week ends, here within the "tumultuous privacy" of the
storm and our own roaring fireplace, with our own apples and popcorn
and books and selves; and when it snows on Monday wishing the weather
would always temper itself and time itself to the peculiar needs of
Mullein Hill--its length of back country road and automobile.

For an automobile is not a snow-plough, however much gasoline you give
it. Time was when I rode a snow-plough and enjoyed it, as my Neighbor
Jonas rides and enjoys his, feeling that he is plenty fast enough, as
indeed he is, his sense of safety on the way, the absolute certainty
(so far as there can be human certainty) of his arriving sometime,
being compensation enough for the loss of those sensations of speed
induced across one's diaphragm and over one's epidermis by the
automobile.

Speeding is a disease of the hair follicles, I think, and the great
hallucination of haste under which we move and try to have a being is
seated in the muscles of the diaphragm. Have I not found myself
rushing for a hundred places by automobile that I never should have
started for at all by hayrick or snow-plough, and thus had saved myself
that time wholly? Space is Time's tail and we can't catch it. The
most we can catch, with the speediest car, is a sight of its tip going
around the corner ahead.

Speed is contagious, and I fear that I have it. I moved away here into
Hingham to escape it, but life in the Hingham hills is not far enough
away to save a man from all that passes along the road. The wind, too,
bloweth where it listeth, and when there is infection on it, you can't
escape by hiding in Hingham--not entirely. And once the sporulating
speed germs get into your system, it is as if Anopheles had bitten you,
their multiplying and bursting into the blood occurring regularly,
accompanied by a chill at two cylinders and followed by a fever for
four; a chill at four and a fever for six--eight--twelve, just like
malaria!

We all have it, all but Neighbor Jonas. He has instead a "stavin'"
good mare by the name of Bill. Bill is speedy. She sprang, years ago,
from fast stock, as you would know if you held the cultivator behind
her. When she comes to harrow the garden, Jonas must needs come with
her to say "Whoa!" all the way, and otherwise admonish and exhort her
into remembering that the cultiv