THE other day I took a walk with a real estate man. Out in the suburbs he leaned over the wooden fence of an empty lot and waved his hand at it.
"There's a lot," he said, "that we sold last week for half a million dollars."
"Did you really!" I exclaimed.
"Yes," he said, "and do you know that twenty-five years ago you could have picked that up for fifty thousand!"
"What," I said, "do you mean to say that I could have had all that beautiful grass and those mullin stalks for fifty thousand dollars?"
"I do."
"You mean that when I was a student at college, feeding on four dollars a week, this opportunity was knocking at the door and I missed it?"
I turned my head away in bitterness as I thought of my own folly. Why had I never happened to walk out this way with fifty thousand dollars in my pocket and buy all this beautiful mud?
The real estate man smiled complacently at my grief.
"I can show you more than that," he said. "Do you see that big stretch of empty ground out there past that last fence?"