It had been thrown out South—and this is quite against our custom; for our older houses looked east and west to take all the sun and to present a corner to the south-west and the storms. So they stand still.
It had round it a solid cornice which the modern men of the towns would have called ugly, but there was ancestry in it. Then, further on this house had modern roominess stretching in one new wing after another; and it had a great set of byres and barns, and there was a copse and some six acres of land. Over a deep gully stood over against it the little town that was the mother of the place; and altogether this good place was enclosed, silent, and secure.
"The fish that misses the hook regrets the worm." If this is not a Chinese proverb it ought to be. That little farm and steading and those six acres, that ravine, those trees, that aspect of the little mothering town; the wooded hills fold above fold, the noble range beyond—all these were not, and for ever will not be mine.
For all I know some man quite unacquainted with that land took the place, grumbling, for a debt; or again, for all I know it may have been bought by a blind man who could not see the hills, or by some man who, seeing them perpetually, regretted the flat marshes of his home. To-day, this very day, up high on Egdean Side, not thinking of such things, through a gap in the trees, I saw again after so many years, set one behind the other, the woods, wave upon wave, the summer heat, the high, bare range guarding all; and in the midst of that landscape, set like a toy, the little Sabine farm.
Then, said I, to this place I might not know, "Continue. Go and serve whom you will. You were not altogether mine because you would not be, and to-day you are not mine at all. You will regret it perhaps, and perhaps you will not. There was verse in you perhaps, or prose, or, much better still (for all I know), contentment for a man. But you refused. You lost your chance. Good-by," and with that I went on into the wood and beyond the gap and saw the sight no more.
It was ten years since I had seen it last, the little Sabine farm. It may be ten years before I see it again, or it may be for ever. But as I went through the woods saying to myself:
"You lost your chance, my little Sabine farm, you lost your chance!" another part of me at once replied:
"Ah, and so did you!"
Then, by way of riposte, I answered in my mind: