e too important. I skulked toward my barn, compelling myself to walk
slowly until I reached the corner, where I broke into an eager run as
though the old Nick himself were after me. Behind the barn I dropped
down on the grass, panting with laughter, and not without some of the
shame a man feels at being a boy. Close along the side of the barn, as I
sat there in the cool of the shade, I could see a tangled mat of
smartweed and catnip, and the boards of the barn, brown and
weather-beaten, and the gables above with mud swallows' nests, now
deserted; and it struck me suddenly, as I observed these homely pleasant
things:

"All this is mine."

I sprang up and drew a long breath.

"Mine," I said.

It came to me then like an inspiration that I might now go out and take
formal possession of my farm. I might experience the emotion of a
landowner. I might swell with dignity and importance--for once, at
least.

So I started at the fence corner back of the barn and walked straight
up through the pasture, keeping close to my boundaries, that I might not
miss a single rod of my acres. And oh, it was a prime afternoon! The
Lord made it! Sunshine--and autumn haze--and red trees--and yellow
fields--and blue distances above the far-away town. And the air had a
tang which got into a man's blood and set him chanting all the poetry he
ever knew.

"I climb that was a clod,
I run whose steps were slow,
I reap the very wheat of God
That once had none to sow!"

So I walked up the margin of my field looking broadly about me: and
presently, I began to examine my fences--_my_ fences--with a critical
eye. I considered the quality of the soil, though in truth I was not
much of a judge of such matters. I gloated over my plowed land, lying
there open and passive in the sunshine. I said of this tree: "It is
mine," and of its companion beyond the fence: "It is my neighbour's."
Deeply and sharply within myself I drew the line between _meum_ and
_tuum_: for only thus, by comparing ourselves with our neighbours, can
we come to the true realisation of property. Occasionally I stopped to
pick up a stone and cast it over the fence, thinking with some
truculence that my neighbour would probably throw it back again. Never
mind, I had it out of _my_ field. Once, with eager surplusage of energy,
I pulled down a dead and partly rotten oak stub, long an eye-sore, with
an important feeling of proprietorship. I could do anything I liked. The
farm was _