grapes there are along the neglected walls, and in a corner of one of
them, by a brook, a mass of sweet currant which in blossom time makes
all that bit of valley a bower of fragrance, I have gone that way often
in spring for the sheer joy of the friendly odours I had across the
ancient stone fences.

The largest and stoniest of the farms is owned by an old man named
Howieson. A strange, brown-clad, crooked, crabbed old man, I have seen
him often creeping across his fields with his horses. An ineffective
worker all his life long, he has scarcely made a living from his stony
acres. His farm is tipped up behind upon the hill and runs below to the
brook, and the buildings are old and worn, and a rocky road goes by to
the town. Once, in more 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 nothing for children to do, and
those who remain are old or discouraged. Some homes have entirely
disappeared, so that all that remains is a clump of lilacs or a wild
tangle of rose bushes about a grass-covered or bush-grown cellar wall.
The last thing to disappear is not that which the old farmers most set
their hearts upon, their fine houses and barns or their cultivated
fields, but the one touch of beauty they left--lilac clump or
rose-tangle.

Old Howieson, with that passion for the sense of possession which
thrives best when the realities of possession are slipping away, has
posted all his fields with warnings against intrusion. You may not enter