with boulders in it, and gnarly hawthorn
trees, and a stunted wild apple or so. A stone fence runs down one side
of the cleared land and above it rises the hill. It is like a great
trough or ravine which upon still spring evenings gathers in all the
varied odours of Old Howieson's farm and orchard and brings them down to
me as I sit in the field below. I need no book then, nor sight of the
distant town, nor song of birds, for I have a singular and incomparable
album of the good odours of the hill. This is one reason why I chose
this particular spot in the fields for my own, and it has given me a
secret name for the place which I will not here disclose. If ever you
should come this way in May, my friend, I might take you there of an
evening, but could warrant you no joy of it that you yourself could not
take. But you need not come here, or go there, but stop where you are at
this moment, and I here assure you that if you look up, and look in,
you, also, will see something of the glory of the world.

One evening I had been upon the hill to seek again the pattern and
dimensions of my tabernacle, and to receive anew the tables of the Jaw.
I had crossed Old Howieson's field so often that I had almost forgotten
it was not my own. It was indeed mine by the same inalienable right that
it belonged to the crows that flew across it, or to the partridges that
nested in its coverts, or the woodchucks that lived in its walls, or the
squirrels in its chestnut trees. It was mine by the final test of all
possession--that I could use it.

He came out of a thicket of hemlocks like a wraith of the past, a gray
and crabbed figure, and confronted me there in the wide field. I
suppose he thought he had caught me at last. I was not at all startled
or even surprised, for as I look back upon it now I know that I had
always been expecting him. Indeed, I felt a lift of the spirit, the kind
of jauntiness with which one meets a crucial adventure.

He stood there for a moment quite silent, a grim figure of denial, and I
facing him.

"You are on my land, sir," he said.

I answered him instantly and in a way wholly unexpected to myself:

"You are breathing my air, sir."

He looked at me dully, but with a curious glint of fear in his eye, fear
and anger, too.

"Did you see the sign down there? This land is posted."

"Yes," I said, "I have seen your signs. But let me ask you: If I were
not here would you own this land any more than you do now?