And here I am on Mullein Hill, Hingham, with all of these streets, and all of these people, and woodchucks a plenty to write about--and planning this day a trip to California! I might have been the author of a recent book whose theme and sub-title read: “In the plains and the rolling country there is room for the individual to skip and frolic, but all the peaks are preëmpted.” Come down from Mullein Hill; get out of Hingham; go West, young writer, as far as California; you shall find room to skip and frolic on the plains out there! It may be true in California, but the opposite of that is true in Hingham. To be sure, I have tried to preëmpt Mullein Hill; I now own the knoll outside my study window, and the seven-acre woodlot beyond; but there are many other peaks here among the hills of Hingham, and scarcely any of them occupied. The people of Hingham all crowd into the plains. So did the people of Israel crowd into the plains--of Moab, leaving Pisgah to Moses, who found it very lonesome. There is no one on Pisgah now, I understand; no one on Ararat; no one on Popocatepetl; no one on the top of Vesuvius, nor on the peak of Everest, peaks as well known as White Plains or the Plains of Abraham, but not anything like so crowded. Moses sleeps on Nebo, yet no man knows where he lies. Have them lay you in Sleepy Hollow if you wish your friends and neighbors to crowd in close and keep you company. Why has there been no Iliad of Hingham? There are Helens in Hingham, as there were Helens of Troy. Hingham is short of Homers. Mute, inglorious Miltons have we in Hingham. If one of them, however, should take his pen in hand, would he dream, and if he dreamed, would he dare to cry to the Heavenly Muse, “I thence Invoke thy aid to my adventurous song, That with no middle flight intends to soar Above the Aonian mount, while it pursues Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme”?