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 for the place which I will not here disclose.  If ever you should come this way in May, my friend, I might take you there of an evening, but could warrant you no joy of it that you yourself could not take.  But you need not come here, or go there, but stop where you are at this moment, and I here assure you that if you look up, and look in, you, also, will see something of the glory of the world.

One evening I had been upon the hill to seek again the pattern and dimensions of my tabernacle, and to receive anew the tables of the Jaw.  I had crossed Old Howieson’s field so 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 that nested in its coverts, or the woodchucks that lived in its walls, or the squirrels in its chestnut trees.  It was mine by the final test of all possession—­that I could use it.

He came out of a thicket of hemlocks like a wraith of the past, a gray and crabbed figure, and confronted me there in the wide field.  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 I had always been expecting him.  Indeed, I felt a lift of the spirit, the kind of jauntiness with which one meets a crucial adventure.

He stood there for a moment quite silent, a grim figure of denial, and I facing him.

“You are on my land, sir,” he said.

I answered him instantly and in a way wholly unexpected to myself: 

“You are breathing my air, sir.”

He looked at me dully, but with a curious glint of fear in his eye, fear and anger, too.

“Did you see the sign down there?  This land is posted.”

“Yes,” I said, “I have seen your signs.  But let me ask you:  If I were not here would you own this land any more than you do now?  Would it yield you any better crops?”

It is never the way of those who live in posted enclosures, of whatever sort, to reason.  They assert.

“This land is posted,” said the old man doggedly.

“Are you sure you own it?” I asked.  “Is it really yours?”

“My father owned this farm before me,” he said, “and my grandfather cleared this field and built these walls.  I was born in that house and have lived there all my life.”

“Well, then, I must be going—­and I will not come here again,” I said.  “I am sorry I walked on your land—­”

I started to go down the hill, but stopped, and said, as though it were an afterthought: 

“I have made some wonderful discoveries upon your land, and that hill there.  You don’t seem to know how valuable this field is....  Good-bye.”