t
he wouldn't take twenty-five thousand dollars for his property, although
ten years earlier he had been eager to sell for five thousand dollars!

That twenty-five thousand dollars, however, was as far away as the five
thousand, and the life in the Church Street house was more penurious and
uncomfortable than it had ever been on the old farm, which had provided
a coarse plenty for many generations. The Clarks were obviously running
out, and when the old man died in 1882 he must have had the bitter
consciousness that the family destiny had dwindled in his hands. From
being prosperous and respected farmers, living on their own land in
their ancestral square wooden house with its one enormous chimney, they
were living in real poverty in a small house on a dusty side street off
the noisy Square, which was not what it had once been as a place of
residence. And they did not even own this Church Street house--merely
clung to it from inertia and bad habit. The only thing they did own was
Clark's Field, and Mrs. John sometimes thought it would be better if
that had gone the way of the rest of the Clark farm, so insidious was
its moral influence upon the men as well as costly in the way of
outgo....

If a man's accomplishment in this life is to be reckoned by the
substantial gains he has made on his father's estate and condition, old
Samuel Clark had nothing to be proud of when he was borne to his grave
in the new cemetery a mile south of Clark's Field. He had left nothing
to his children but the Field, encumbered with the undivided and
indivisible half interest belonging to his brother Edward Stanley, were
he alive at this date, and to his heirs if he had any.

II

The possession of property of any kind gives a curious consciousness of
dignity to the human being who is its owner, due very likely to the
traditional estimate of the importance of all possessions, and to the
mystical but generally erroneous belief that property is in some way an
outward and visible proof of the worth or the ability of its
possessor--or his forbears. Even the possession of a possibility such as
Clark's Field--which was of no positive value to the Clarks, and indeed
an increasing source of expense and anxiety to the impoverished family,
as taxes rose in company with the rise of all values--conferred upon the
Clarks some small consideration in Alton and made them feel the dignity
and the tragedy of property ownership. John, who was nothing