We started in the sheep-cote, back yonder when all the world was twenty
or thereabouts, and when every wild-cherry-bush was an olive tree. But
one day the tent caterpillar like a wolf swept down on our fold of
cherry-bushes and we fled Arden, never to get back. We lived for a
time in town and bought olives in bottles, stuffed ones sometimes, then
we got a hill in Hingham, just this side of Arden, still buying our
olives, but not our apples now, nor our peaches, nor our musk melons,
nor our wood for the open fire. We buy commutation tickets, and pay
dearly for the trips back and forth. But we could n't make a living in
Arden. Our hill in Hingham is a compromise.

Only folk of twenty and close to twenty live in Arden. We are forty
now and no longer poets. When we are really old and our grasshoppers
become a burden, we may go back to town where the insects are an
entirely different species; but for this exceedingly busy present,
between our fading dawn of visions and our coming dusk of dreams, a
hill in Hingham, though a compromise, is an almost strategic position,
Hingham being more or less of an escape from Boston, and the hill,
though not in the Forest of Arden, something of an escape from Hingham,
a quaint old village of elm-cooled streets and gentle neighbors. Not
that we hate Boston, nor that we pass by on the other side in Hingham.
We gladly pick our neighbors up and set them in our motor car and bring
them to the foot of the hill. We people of the hills do not hate
either crowds or neighbors. We are neighbors ourselves and parts of
the city crowds too; and we love to bind up wounds and bring folk to
their inns. But we cannot take them farther, for there are no inns out
here. We leave them in Hingham and journey on alone into a region
where neither thief nor anyone infests the roadsides; where there are
no roads in fact, but only driftways and footpaths through the sparsely
settled hills.