My Real Estate

MOST of us cherish a more or less concealed desire to own some one special object just beyond our financial reach. Perhaps you have always wanted a steam yacht; your neighbor confessed to me the other night that from boyhood he had longed to possess a locomotive. “What a king among pets that would be! ” he exclaimed; then laughed, shamefacedly, to assure me that he was joking. But I had seen the gleam in his eyes, and knew he meant it. I have a friend whose modest salary barely suffices for the support of the family, and I happen to know that his dearest ambition for years has been to own a Kelmscott Chaucer. If the prices for the output of that celebrated press continue to fall, as they have in recent auctions, his wish may yet be gratified. With this preamble, let me confess that my pet desire has long been to possess a piece of real estate; and that I am now actually a real-estate owner — in an odd kind of way.

This is how it happened. At the foot of a certain slope of rough pasture-land, in one of the southern counties of Maine, is a brook where I often fished when a boy. So familiar to me are its banks, that on sleepless nights I have more than once fished the stream, in memory, for a mile or more, recalling every rapid, pool, and mimic cascade, and pausing now and then to take a trout from the spots where in the old days I was surest of success. My father was my chosen companion for these little fishing excursions, and when at last we had wound up our lines, and shouldered or thrown away our rods (cut from some alders at the brookside), we made our way wearily but happily back, up the rising ground, through tangled thickets of pine and juniper and sweet-fern, fragrant, in the hot forenoon sunshine, toward the old farmhouse, a mile away.

Half-way to the house, the path brought us to a huge pine, some six feet in diameter, standing by itself on a grassy hillock of the pasture. Here, in the grateful shade of the far-spreading green boughs, with their soft music above us, we always threw ourselves down on the grass and rested before resuming our journey homeward. It is many years since that dear and gentle comrade passed from my sight; but at long intervals I find time to fish the little trout-stream, to inhale the fragrance of the sweet-fern, and to pause under the old pine and listen to its songs of eternity.

Not long ago I heard that the owner of the pasture had decided to sell that tree to a lumber firm. My resolve was quickly taken. Would he accept — I named a small sum — and leave the tree standing, as my sole property? Well, he “ reckoned he would. ’T was more ’n the lumber company offered.” The money was paid down and the deed was solemnly drawn up, signed, sealed, and passed. The pine tree was, and is, my own, and constitutes my sole “real ” possession. Just what my legal rights are in the premises, I am sure I do not know. Not an inch of the surrounding land is mine—only the tree, above and below ground; the great, knotty trunk; the far-spreading, singing boughs, tasseled with green; and the strong roots, an inverted tree underground.

Tenants I have, a plenty. Never yet, I believe, have I looked up into the shining galleries and sun-lighted halls of my building not made with hands, but I have caught glimpses of a flitting wing, or heard a low, sweet warble from some hidden chamber high up in the topmost stories. Even in winter, a sable-plumed visitor pauses occasionally on its lofty window-ledges, ere he utters a single, startled “Caw!” and sails away across the snowy pasture to a remoter covert beyond the marsh. Or, perchance, the stranger is decked in colors of the December sky and earth. He raises his saucy crest, and, by way of leaving his visiting-card, screams at me, “Jay! Jay!” To-day a flock of snow-birds, cloud-colored and wintry, drift through the lower branches like wind-swept leaves from the neighboring oak.

As darkness falls, the birds nestle in shadowed nooks, or seek more sheltered resting-places for their little feet. Then enters another tenant, even more constant than they. It is the night wind; and through the long hours when the moonlight is steel-bright on the crisp snow, and the stars are alight above, the sleepless wind murmurs and chants its surf-songs in the swaying branches, the mysterious depths of the great pine.