"Yes."
"Well, my father bought it the other day."
... Something rolled over me, or within. This was a pervading ache that had to do with the previous summer. I had ridden several times to the Perfect Lane. It cut a man's farm in two from north to south and was natural; that is, the strip of trees had been left when the land was cleared, and they had reached a venerable age. Oak, hickory and beech—clean, vast, in-their-prime forest-men—with thorn and dogwood growing between. It had been like a prayer to ride through that Lane. The cattle had made a path on the clay and the grass had grown in soft and blue-green in the shade. In sapling days, the great trees had woven their trunks on either side of a rail-fence that had stood for a half-century. It was an approach to the farm-house that an artist would have named an estate after—or a province.
Then came the day that I rode toward a smudge in the sky, and found men and boys at work burning and cutting. The superb aisle was down. I turned the horse and rode back. I learned that in the fields on either side of the lane a strip of land, fifty or sixty feet wide, had been too much shaded so that the corn and oats had not prospered. Perhaps it was there that the cruelty of the narrow-templed Order made its deepest impression. God bless the fodder—but what a price to pay. They had burned the thorn and dogwood, felled the giants; they would plough under that sacred cattle-path.
Then I thought of the denuded lands of North America; the billions of cubic feet of natural gas wasted; lakes of oil, provinces of pine and hard-wood vanished; the vast preserves of game destroyed to the wolf and the pig and the ostrich still left in man's breast. The story of the struggle for life on Mars came to me—how the only water that remains in that globe of quickened evolution is at the polar caps, and that the canals draw down from the meltings of the warm season the entire supply for the midland zones. They have stopped wastage on Mars.
It was these things that came to me at the mere mention of the transfer of the woodland property. If it were going to be cut, I was glad I hadn't seen it, and certainly I didn't want to enter now.
"What's your father going to do with it?" I asked.
"Use it for a pasture."
"Isn't going to cut it—any of it?"
"No."