Adventures in Contentment | Page 6

ardour to anticipate him:
"Horace," I exclaim, "you're a Farmer."

[Illustration: "The heat and sweat of the hay fields"]

III
THE JOY OF POSSESSION
"How sweet the west wind sounds in my own trees: How graceful
climb these shadows on my hill."
Always as I travel, I think, "Here I am, let anything happen!"
I do not want to know the future; knowledge is too certain, too cold, too
real.
It is true that I have not always met the fine adventure nor won the
friend, but if I had, what should I have more to look for at other
turnings and other hilltops?
The afternoon of my purchase was one of the great afternoons of my
life. When Horace put me down at my gate, I did not go at once to the
house; I did not wish, then, to talk with Harriet. The things I had with
myself were 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
mine.
How sweet an emotion is possession! What charm is inherent in
ownership! What a foundation for vanity, even for the greater quality of
self-respect, lies in a little property! I fell to thinking of the excellent
wording of the old books in which land is called "real property," or
"real estate." Money we may possess, or goods or chattels, but they
give no such impression of mineness as the feeling that one's feet rest

upon soil that is his: that part of the deep earth is his with all the water
upon it, all small animals that creep or crawl in the holes of it, all birds
or insects that fly in the air above it, all trees, shrubs, flowers, and grass
that grow upon it, all houses, barns and fences--all, his. As I strode
along that afternoon I fed upon possession. I rolled the sweet morsel of
ownership under my tongue. I seemed to set my feet down more firmly
on the good earth. I straightened my shoulders: this land was mine. I
picked up a clod of earth and let it crumble and drop through my
fingers: it gave me a peculiar and