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 poignant feeling of possession.  I can understand why the miser enjoys the very physical contact of his gold.  Every sense I possessed, sight, hearing, smell, touch, led upon the new joy.

At one corner of my upper field the fence crosses an abrupt ravine upon leggy stilts.  My line skirts the slope halfway up.  My neighbour owns the crown of the hill which he has shorn until it resembles the tonsured pate of a monk.  Every rain brings the light soil down the ravine and lays it like a hand of infertility upon my farm.  It had always bothered me, this wastage; and as I looked across my fence I thought to myself: 

“I must have that hill.  I will buy it.  I will set the fence farther up.  I will plant the slope.  It is no age of tonsures either in religion or agriculture.”

The very vision of widened acres set my thoughts on fire.  In imagination I extended my farm upon all sides, thinking how much better I could handle my land than my neighbours.  I dwelt avariciously upon more possessions:  I thought with discontent of my poverty.  More land I wanted.  I was enveloped in clouds of envy.  I coveted my neighbour’s land:  I felt myself superior and Horace inferior:  I was consumed with black vanity.

So I dealt hotly with these thoughts until I reached the top of the ridge at the farther corner of my land.  It is the highest point on the farm.

For a moment I stood looking about me on a wonderful prospect of serene beauty.  As it came to me—­hills, fields, woods—­the fever which had been consuming me died down.  I thought how the world stretched away from my fences—­just such fields—­for a thousand miles, and in each small enclosure a man as hot as I with the passion of possession.  How they all envied, and hated, in their longing for more land!  How property kept them apart, prevented the close, confident touch of friendship, how it separated lovers and ruined families!  Of all obstacles to that complete democracy of which we dream, is there a greater than property?