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 the time to have written the book that I had intended this one
to be--while the adventure in contentment was still an adventure, while
the lure of the land was of fourteen acres yet unexplored, while back
to the soil meant exactly what the seed catalogues picture it, and my
summer in a garden had not yet passed into its frosty fall. Instead, I
have done what no writer ought to do, what none ever did before, unless
Jacob wrote,--taken a fourteen-year-old enthusiasm for my theme, to
find the enthusiasm grown, as Rachel must have grown by the time Jacob
got her, into a philosophy, and like all philosophies, in need of
defense.

What men live by is an interesting speculative question, but what men
live on, and where they can live,--with children to bring up, and their
own souls to save,--is an intensely practical question which I have
been working at these fourteen years here in the Hills of Hingham.