The Rescue of an Old Place 



OldHing- 



ham. 



A Memory 

 of Lincoln- 

 shire. 



for stability, for tradition, for something 

 to link us with that past which goes back 

 so little way behind us here. Perhaps the 

 grafts on these mossy limbs were brought 

 from England by the early settlers who peo- 

 pled the old colony. Under their shade the 

 sturdy Puritan has leaned upon his spade 

 and remembered the orchards of his native 

 land, which he was never to see again ; 

 and now, as the vision grows before our 

 dreaming eyes, we climb the ladder of the 

 past, and are again in Lincolnshire, and 

 the choir-boys are chanting softly in the 

 distance, and the bells are ringing from St. 

 Andrew's Church, of the other Hingham, 

 the gray towers of which we see afar off, 

 instead of the quaint spire of our old 

 meeting-house, whose tenscore years of 

 life seem so little in the older world, where 

 they reckon time by centuries instead of 

 decades. 



We see the wide green fens, and the 

 fallow fields besprinkled with grazing 

 herds, the rich meadows where the lush 

 grass grows, and where great crops repay 

 the farmers easy labor ; the wolds with 

 their chalk-hills, the thrifty hamlets, the 

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