There is something in that. It is a bad sort of world that has only two poles. It should be stuck full of poles, one for each of us. But there are only two, and a flag flies from each of them; as a flag flies over every terrestrial spot in between them: over Mount McKinley now; over the River of Doubt now, so that we are stopped from singing, as once we sang,-- “There’s one more river, There’s one more river to cross.” There is no more river to cross. Theodore Roosevelt crossed it. There is nothing to cross; no place to go where, on the surface of things, men have not been there before us. Yes, yes, there is Mount Everest. No one has yet stood on that peak; but there is an expedition climbing it, camping to-day at about twenty-five thousand feet up, with only two or three thousand feet more to go. And here we are in Hingham! It looks bad. My young niece is possibly right, after all. East, west, north, south, where is a frontier? Where shall I go from here and find an escape? Not overland any longer, for even Thoreau could find no frontier this way; and not by sea now, for here comes John Masefield, poet and sailor, saying the frontier has disappeared from off the sea; that the clipper ship, the ship of dreams, has foundered and gone down; that you can haunt the wharves these piping times of steam, “Yet never see those proud ones swaying home, With mainyards backed and bows acream with foam. * * * * * As once, long since, when all the docks were filled With that sea beauty man has ceased to build.” Listen, now, for this is the message of the poem: “They mark our passage as a race of men, Earth will not see such ships again,--” which makes me thank Heaven for my farm, where the same old romantic hoe remains about what it ever was--the first recorded wedding present. Mr. Masefield’s observations are dated 1912. Prior to that year real clipper ships rode the deep, and real romance. It was prior to 1839 that there were real frontiers and romance in the land, and a last house (a government lighthouse) still to be set up in the suburbs of Astoria City. Going a little farther back, we find that prior to 1491 (B.C.), about the year 4000 according to the margin of the King James Version, there were giants in the earth, and the stories in the Book of Genesis show that there were romances as well as giants in those days. But, like Thoreau and Masefield, Moses was born fatally late. I feel sorry for Moses and my niece.