ner, if he is rather a
gross man, believes these races of reeds are his. But if he is a man of
sensibility, depend upon it he has his interior doubts. His property, he
says, goes right down to the centre of the earth, in the shape of a
wedge; how high up it goes into the air it would be difficult to say, and
obviously the shape of the wedge must be continued in the direction of
increase. We may therefore proclaim his right to the clouds and their
cargo. It is true that as his ground game is apt to go upon his
neighbour's land to be shot, so the clouds may now and then spend his
showers elsewhere. But the great thing is the view. A well-appointed
country-house sees nothing out of the windows that is not its own. But
he who tells you so, and proves it to you by his own view, is certainly
disturbed by an unspoken doubt, if his otherwise contented eyes should
happen to be caught by a region of rushes. The water is his--he had the
pond made; or the river, for a space, and the fish, for a time. But the
bulrushes, the reeds! One wonders whether a very thorough landowner, but
a sensitive one, ever resolved that he would endure this sort of thing no
longer, and went out armed and had a long acre of sedges scythed to
death.

They are probably outlaws. They are dwellers upon thresholds and upon
margins, as the gipsies make a home upon the green edges of a road. No
wild flowers, however wild, are rebels. The copses and their primroses
are good subjects, the oaks are loyal. Now and then, though, one has a
kind of suspicion of some of the other kinds of trees--the Corot trees.
Standing at a distance from the more ornamental trees, from those of
fuller foliage, and from all the indeciduous shrubs and the conifers
(manifest property, every one), two or three translucent aspens, with
which the very sun and the breath of earth are entangled, have sometimes
seemed to wear a certain look--an extra-territorial look, let us call it.
They are suspect. One is inclined to shake a doubtful head at them.

And the landowner feels it. He knows quite well, though he may not say
so, that the Corot trees, though they do not dwell upon margins, are in
spirit almost as extra-territorial as the rushes. In proof of this he
very often cuts them down, out of the view, once for all. The view is
better, as a view, without them. Though their roots are in his ground
right enough, there is a something about their heads--. But the reason
he g