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."

With that I took two or three steps down the hill--but felt the old
man's hand on my arm.

"Say, mister," he asked, "are you one of the electric company men? Is
that high-tension line comin' across here?"

"No," I said, "it is something more valuable than that!"

I walked onward a few steps, as though I was quite determined to get out
of his field, but he followed close behind me.

"It ain't the new trolley line, is it?"

"No," I said, "it isn't the trolley line."

"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 TRE