North of Boston

They aint much happened sence the last riting. Just as winter set in good I driv down into Maine on a matter of worldly business. Swung along the coast seeing various characters. About an hour after dark, shot the brakes and slid into Rick Jackson's long driveway. He is '27.

Spent a short evening going over his old cars and guns. Turned in early and got up early, for it was a business day coming.

Just starting to warm up the car and say so long when he ast me to take a short ride. I done so. The road come out onto a high hill. He swung off through a bar way in a stone wall and stopped short.

It was a picnic spot with outdoor fireplaces and tables and a view that stopped your breath quick. And there stood a brand new Episcopal Chapel. They had dug and blasted into the side of the young mountain for the foundations. The building was set so that folks meeting in the parish house, which was the basement, had the whole view at a glance.

We stood side by side in the deep cold, dragging at our cigarettes. Rick told, in short words, how they had worked for three years to get the land, the material, the labor and the money to put it up.

I looked over the valley with the long ice-locked lake, the snow-patched fields, the black woods and the far off houses with the breakfast smoke coming straight up. The East was red behind a snow cloud bank.

"You and I," I sed, "have kidded each other ever since we first met at Horace Hurlburt's gun rack in Hanover in the fall of '23.

"Let's get serious for a moment. What you've done here — in helping raise this House of God on this hilltop - justifies your having lived. I'm proud to call you my friend of most a third of a century." Then I run out of words.

Rick give me that level Maine stare, "Well," he flipped his cigarette, "probably no great harm will come out of it all. Now let's roll."

I do wisht wun or two of you fellers could of stood on that cold hill top with us. You might of liked it.