One of my friends started for Hanover once for a day of hunting--but I will let him tell the story: “We were on our way to Hanover, duck hunting,” he said, “and at Assinippi took the left fork of the road and kept going. But was this left fork the right road? [An ancient doubt which had brought many a traveler before them to confusion and a halt.] It was early morning, raw and dark and damp. No one was stirring in the farmhouses straggling along the road, and we were turning to go back to the forks when the kitchen door of the near-by house opened and a gray-bearded man appeared with a milk-pail on his elbow. “‘Is this the road to Hanover?’ we called. “The man backed into the kitchen door, put down his milk-pail, came out again, carefully closing the door behind him, and started down the walk toward the front gate. He opened the gate, turned and latched it behind him as carefully as he had latched the kitchen door, and, stepping out into the road, approached our carryall. Looking up, then down the road intently, he hitched his right foot to the hub of our front wheel, spat precisely into the dust, and, fixing his face steadfastly toward Cape Cod, answered: “‘No.’ “‘Say it with flowers!’ snapped our driver, wheeling about for the other fork. “At the turn I looked back. There stood our guide in the road, his right foot still in the air, I think; and there--though it is several years since, he may still be standing--one foot planted on the road to Scituate, the other foot resting on the hub of the wheel that should have been on the road to Hanover.” The man in the road knew that this road ran to Scituate. He lived on it. Had they asked him: “Master, which is the Great Commandment?” he had answered: “Take this road for Scituate.” For were they not duck hunting in Hanover? Then what profounder error could they have been in than on the road to Scituate! But most people go that way for Hanover. Every young writer I know hankers to get his Hanover ducks out of Scituate, as if, failing to get ducks, he might get Scituate; novelty, the mere novelty of gunning in Scituate when the ducks are in Hanover, making the best sort of “copy.” Is it some new thing that we should search out, or some deeper, truer thing? Must we travel, or may we stay at home? Locomotion is certainly a curse to literature. No one nowadays stays long enough in his own place to know it and himself in it, which is about all that he can know well enough to express. Let the writer stay at home. Drummers, actors, circus-men, and Satan are free to go up and down the earth. And these seem to be writing most of our books.