ement perhaps the greatest
of the joys is the return, freshened and sweetened, to the common life.
How good then appear the things of the garden and farm, the house and
shop, that weariness had staled; how good the faces of friends.

CHAPTER VI

+NO TRESPASS+

I live in a country of beautiful hills, and in the last few years, since
I have been here with Harriet, I have made familiar and pleasant
acquaintance with several of them....

One hill I know is precious to me for a peculiar reason. Upon the side
of it, along the town road, are two or three old farms with lilacs like
trees about their doorways, and ancient apple orchards with great gnarly
branches, and one has an old garden of hollyhocks, larkspurs, zinnias,
mignonette, and I know not how many other old-fashioned flowers. Wild
grapes there are along the neglected walls, and in a corner of one of
them, by a brook, a mass of sweet currant which in blossom time makes
all that bit of valley a bower of fragrance, I have gone that way often
in spring for the sheer joy of the friendly odours I had across the
ancient stone fences.

The largest and stoniest of the farms is owned by an old man named
Howieson. A strange, brown-clad, crooked, crabbed old man, I have seen
him often creeping across his fields with his horses. An ineffective
worker all his life long, he has scarcely made a living from his stony
acres. His farm is tipped up behind upon the hill and runs below to the
brook, and the buildings are old and worn, and a rocky road goes by to
the town. Once, in more prosperous days, before the factories took over
the winter work of these hill farms, the busy families finished shoes,
and wove cloth, and plaited straw hats--and one I know was famous for
wooden bowls craftily hollowed out of maple knots--and the hill people
relied upon their stony fields for little more than their food. But in
these later days, the farm industries are gone, the houses are no longer
overflowing with children, for there is nothing for children to do, and
those who remain are old or discouraged. Some homes have entirely
disappeared, so that all that remains is a clump of lilacs or a wild
tangle of rose bushes about a grass-covered or bush-grown cellar wall.
The last thing to disappear is not that which the old farmers most set
their hearts upon, their fine houses and barns or their cultivated
fields, but the one touch of beauty they left--lilac clump or
rose-tangle.

Old Howies