beautiful grass and those mullin stalks for fifty thousand dollars?"

"I do."

"You mean that when I was a student at college, feeding on four dollars
a week, this opportunity was knocking at the door and I missed it?"

I turned my head away in bitterness as I thought of my own folly. Why
had I never happened to walk out this way with fifty thousand dollars in
my pocket and buy all this beautiful mud?

The real estate man smiled complacently at my grief.

"I can show you more than that," he said. "Do you see that big stretch
of empty ground out there past that last fence?"

"Yes, yes," I said excitedly, "the land with the beautiful tar-paper
shack and the withered cedar tree,--the one withered cedar
tree,--standing in its lonely isolation and seeming to beckon----"

"Say," he said, "was you ever in the real estate business yourself?"

"No," I answered, "but I have a poetic mind, and I begin to see the
poetry, the majesty, of real estate."

"Oh, is that it," he answered. "Well, that land out there,--it's an acre
and a half,--was sold yesterday for three million dollars!!"

"For what!"

"For three million dollars, cold."

"Not COLD!" I said, "don't tell me it was cold."

"Yes," went on the real estate man, "and only three years ago you could
have come out here and had it for a song!"

"For a song!" I repeated.

Just think of it! And I had missed it! With a voice like mine. If I had
known what I know now, I would have come out to that land and sung to it
all night. I never knew in the days when I was content with fifteen
dollars a week what a hidden gift my voice was. I should have taken up
land-singing and made a fortune out of it.

The thought of it saddened me all the way home: and the talk of the real
estate man as he went made me feel still worse.

He showed me a church that I could have bought for a hundred thousand
and sold now at half a million for a motor garage. If I had started
buying churches instead of working on a newspaper, I'd have been rich
to-day.

There was a skating rink I could have bought, and a theatre and a fruit
store, a beautiful little one-story wooden fruit store, right on a
corner, with the darlingest Italian in it that you ever saw. There was
the cutest little pet of a cow-stable that I could have turned into an
apartment store at a profit of a million,--at the time when I was
studying Greek and forgetting it. Oh! the wasted opportunities of life!

And that evening whe