"What is it, then?"

In that question, eager and shrill, spoke the dry soul of the old man,
the lifelong hope that his clinging ownership of those barren acres
would bring him from the outside some miraculous profit.

His whole bearing had changed. He had ceased to be truculent or even
fearful, but was now shrilly beseeching, A great wave of compassion came
over me, I was sorry for him, imprisoned there within the walls of his
own making, and expecting wealth from the outside when there was wealth
in plenty within and everywhere about him.

But how could I help him? You can give no valuable thing to any man who
has not the vision to take it. If I had told him what I found upon his
hill or in his fields he would have thought me--well, crazy; or he would
have suspected that under cover of such a quest I hid some evil design.
As well talk adventure to an old party man, or growth to a set
churchman.

So I left him there within his walls. So often when we think we are
barring other people out, we are only barring ourselves in. The last I
saw of him as I turned into the road was a gray and crabbed figure
standing alone, looking after me, and not far off his own sign:

[Illustration: NO TRESPASS JAMES HOWIESON]

Sometime, I thought, this old farm will be owned by a man who is also
capable of possessing it. More than one such place I know already has
been taken by those who value the beauty of the hills and the old walls,