“Is this so? Do you want to leave Boston for Fairyland, instead of Chicago? Do you?” She was staggered by the suddenness and savageness of it all and rose to her feet, adorably pink in her confusion, stammering, “No, no, I beg--of course I--no, I don’t”--by this time so recovered that her eyes flashed wrath as she dropped to her seat amid the gaping and the twittering of the class. “If you don’t mean it,” I demanded, “why in the sacred name of literature did you write it? Why don’t you ever write what you mean? And you mean that Boston has suddenly become a back number for literature; that the literary center has shifted to Chicago--that’s what you mean. Chicago! the one romantic, fairy-like spot on earth! Isn’t that what you mean? Then don’t you see how fresh, how thrilling a theme you have in _your_ Chicago? No one else, perhaps, ever saw Chicago in quite this rosy, romantic light before.” Hers is the enduring truth about Chicago; as against that set forth by Mr. Armour in “The Packers, the Private Car Lines, and the People.” Here she was, herself the very stuff of the eternal in literature, and forced to Fairyland for something to write about! Sheer nonsense. One need not take the wings of the morning to the uttermost sea, or make one’s bed in Hell for “copy.” Chicago will do--or Boston--or even Hingham. To be, if to be only a stock or a stone, beast or bird or man, is to be a story, while to be any one of my neighbors is to be an epic. The day we moved out here, before our goods arrived, a strangely youthful pair, far on in the eighties, struggled up the hill from the old farm below to greet us. He was clad in overalls and topcoat, and she in flowers, overflowing from both her arms, and in wild confusion on the gayest Easter bonnet that ever bloomed. “How do you do, neighbors!” she began, extending her armfuls of glorious mountain laurel; “Mr. White and I bring you the welcome of the Hingham Hills”--Mr. White’s rough old hand grasping mine amid the blossoms. “Why,” I cried, “I didn’t know the Hingham Hills could hold such a welcome. I have tramped the woods about here, but I never found a bunch of laurel.” “Ah, you didn’t get into Valley Swamp! Mr. White and I will show you, won’t we, Georgie? We know where odes hang on hawthorns, don’t we? We are busy farmers, and you know what farming is; but we have never ploughed up our poetry-patch, have we, Georgie?” They never had; nor much of their other ninety-six acres either--the whole farm a joyous riot of free verse: fences without line or meter: cattle running where they liked; the farm kit--a mowing machine, a sulky plough, and a stolid old grindstone--straying romantically about the shy sweet fields. It was an ode of a carriage that the spoony old couple went to town in, with wheels dactylic on one side and iambic on the other, and so broken a line for a back spring that Mrs. White would slide into Mr. White’s lap without cæsura or even a punctuation mark to hinder.