Adventures in Contentment

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.