Great Possessions

w years, since I have been here with Harriet, I have made

nches, 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

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 not

ion are slipping away, has posted all his fields with warnings against intrusion. You may not enter this old

whitened into winter, I came into more and more complete possession of all those fields that he so jealously posted. I looked with strange joy upon his hill, saw April blossom in his orchard, and May colour the wild grape leaves along his walls. June I smelled in the swe

es, his corn, his oats, his hay. Intensive cultivation is as important in these wider fields of the spirit as in any other. If I consider the things that I hear and see and smell, and the thoughts that go with them or grow out of them, a

ts, and high above it I can see the clouds floating in the deep sky, or, if I turn my head the other way, for I am a kind of monarch there on the hill and command the world to delight me, I can look off across the pleasant valley with its spreading fields and farmste

e boulders and old walls and oak trees of that hillside. Sometimes I climb to the top of the hill. If I am in a leisurely mood I walk lawfully around Old Ho

less than human. He was kneeling there among the low verdure of a shallow valley, and looked like an old gray rock or some prehistoric animal. I stopped to look at him, but he paid no heed, and seemed only to shrink into himself as though, if he kept silent, he might be t

nexpected crop from Old Howieso

te still, as one might watch a turt

ith age. He gathers bitter-bark, tansy; ginseng, calamus, smartweed, and slippery elm, and from along old fences and barnyards, catnip and boneset, I suppose he lives somewhere, a hole in a log, or the limb of a tree, but no one knows where it is, or how he dries or cures his findings. No one knows his name: perhaps he has forgotten it himse

t for certain furtive old women, few

said nothing at all; but took out dry bundles of catnip, sassafras, slippery elm, to show me. He had also pennyroyal for healing teas, and calamus and bitter-bark for miseries. I selected a c

ng and going, for the road winds along the side of the hill within sight of his house, skirts a

suspicious! To go in at one end of a well-travelled road and not to come out in the regular and expected way at the other! Or to be suspected of not being deferential toward trespass signs, or observant of closed ways! H

boundaries: and those who adventure offend those who seek security; b

enings 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 fo

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 t

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

quite silent, a grim figure

my land, s

ly and in a way wholly

reathing m

th a curious glint of fear in

ign down there? Th

you: If I were not here would you own this land any mor

live in posted enclosures, of wha

sted," said the

wn it?" I asked. "I

grandfather cleared this field and built these walls. I

will not come here again," I said.

, but stopped, and said, as t

ur land, and that hill there. You don't seem to

steps down the hill-but felt

of the electric company men? Is that

is something more

I was quite determined to get out of hi

new trolley

"it isn't the

is it,

man, the lifelong hope that his clinging ownership of those barr

A great wave of compassion came over me, I was sorry for him, imprisoned there within the walls of his own m

what I found upon his hill or in his fields he would have thought me-well, crazy; or he would have suspected that under

out, we are only barring ourselves in. The last I saw of him as I turned into the road wa

, and many others have been taken by men who saw forests growing where forests ought to grow. For real possession is not a thing of inheritance or of documents, but of the spirit; and passes by vision and imagination. Sometimes, indeed, the trespass signs stand long-so long that we grow impatient-but nature is in no hurry. Nature waits, and presently the trespass signs rot aw