One might never leave Ur were he not seeking a city. And one must never find his city else he might cease his seeking. I do not know how old Abraham was when he set out from Ur of the Chaldees. I left Haleyville at the age of eight. I have only lately come to Hingham, having got in on the wrong side of the railroad track some twenty years ago. (If one is really to arrive in Hingham, one must come in with one’s ancestors, and more than twenty years before.) I say, I was eight when I left Haleyville; that I have hardly yet arrived in Hingham; but all the way from Haleyville to Hingham, and all the way from Hingham to--Heaven, dare I say?--there has been, and there shall be, held out, in both of Life’s hands to me, the magical chance of escape. Did I start out from Hingham to find the frontier? That was wrong. I will start back for Hingham. Hingham _is_ the frontier. So was Haleyville. So will Heaven be. Life with the earth goes round, not forward, except to complete a circuit established when the stars were fixed, an orbit that all the forces of Heaven and human intelligence have been unable to warp. The only variation or shadow of new turning Earth herself can look forward to is from collision with some mad comet, which, if she lasts long enough, may happen possibly within fifteen million years--a square head-on smash it may be, or only a side-swipe with a severe shaking up--and then fifteen million years more of steady turning. Things outside are rather hard and fast despite appearances, and we who are parts of this even scheme, we find that our uprisings and downsittings have never varied much from rule, nor are liable to. We are, I repeat, what we always were, and so are things what they always were, though they look different. So is life what it always was for adventures and frontiers. The wild frontier, like the hunted fox, has doubled on its trail, that is all. Romance has slipped out of the woods into the deeper places of the city; Adventure has turned commuter; and here are the three to companion life, as they ever have--the Athos, Porthos, and Aramis to a bebundled D’Artagnan. And already it is more than “Twenty Years Since.” Twenty years, or a hundred years-- “The year’s at the spring.” If you do not find your fill of adventure with Davy Balfour in Appin, come down with him to Dean--to Edinburgh, and you shall see the face of such danger “in the midst of what they call the safety of a town” as may shake you, too, “beyond experience.”