mustard-plaster is to circulation--a counter-irritant. The thinker is
one who finds himself (quite impossible on Broadway!); and then finds
himself _interesting_--more interesting than Broadway--another
impossibility within the city limits. Only in the country can he do
that, in a wide and negative environment of quiet, room, and
isolation--necessary conditions for the enjoyment of one's own mind.
Thought is a country product and comes in to the city for distribution,
as books are gathered and distributed by libraries, but not written in
libraries. It is against the wide, drab background of the country that
thought most naturally reacts, thinking being only the excitement of a
man discovering himself, as he is compelled to do, where bending
horizon and arching sky shift as he shifts in all creation's constant
endeavor to swing around and center on him. Nothing centers on him in
the city, where he thinks by "mental massage"--through the scalp with
laying on of hands, as by benediction or shampoo.

But for the busy man, say of forty, are the hills of Hingham with their
adventure possible? Why, there is nothing ailing the man of forty
except that he now is neither young nor old, nor rich, the chances are;
nor a dead failure either, but just an average man; yet he is one of
God's people, if the Philistines were (He brought them from Caphtor)
and the Syrians (those He brought from Kir). The man of forty has a
right to so much of the Promised Land as a hill in Hingham. But he is
afraid to possess it because it is so far from work and friends and
lighted streets. He is afraid of the dark and of going off to sit down
upon a stump for converse with himself. He is afraid he won't get his
work done. If his work were planting beans, he would get none planted
surely while on the stump; but so he might be saved the ungracious task
of giving away his surplus beans to bean-ridden friends for the summer.
A man, I believe, can plant too many beans. He might not finish the