freshman themes either. But when was the last freshman theme ever
done? Finish them if he can, he has only baked the freshmen into
sophomores, and so emptied the ovens for another batch of dough. He
shall never put a crust on the last freshman, and not much of a crust
on the last sophomore either, the Almighty refusing to coöperate with
him in the baking. Let him do the best he can, not the most he can,
and quit for Hingham and the hills where he can go out to a stump and
sit down.

College students also are a part of that world which can be too much
with us, cabbages, too, if we are growing cabbages. We don't do
over-much, but we are over-busy. We want too much. Buy a little hill
in Hingham, and even out here, unless you pray and go apart often to
your stump, your desire will be toward every hill in sight and the
valleys between.

According to the deed my hill comprises "fourteen acres more or less"
of an ancient glacier, a fourteen-acre heap of unmitigated gravel,
which now these almost fourteen years I have been trying to clear of
stones, picking, picking for a whole Stone Age, and planning daily to
buy the nine-acre ridge adjoining me which is gravelier than mine. By
actual count we dumped five hundred cartloads of stones into the
foundation of a porch when making over the house recently--and still I
am out in the garden picking, picking, living in the Stone Age still,
and planning to prolong the stay by nine acres more that are worse than
these I now have, nine times worse for stones!

I shall never cease picking stones, I presume, but perhaps I can get
out a permanent injunction against myself, to prevent my buying that
neighboring gravel hill, and so find time to climb my own and sit down