These scant freeholds had thus their pathos, marking
as they did the losing fight of successive holders against more
fortunate, more powerful neighbors. Nothing in its way records
more surely the clash and struggle and ranking of men than the
boundaries of land. There you see extinction and survival, the
perpetual going under of the weak, the perpetual overriding of the
strong.
Two such fragmentary farms lay on opposite sides of the Meredith
estate. One was the property of Ambrose Webb, a married but
childless man who, thus exempt from necessity of raking the earth
for swarming progeny, had sown nearly all his land in grass and
rented it as pasturage: no crops of children, no crops of grain.
The other farm was of less importance. Had you ridden from the
front door of the Merediths northward for nearly a mile, you would
have reached the summit of a slope sweeping a wide horizon.
Standing on this summit any one of these bright summer days, you
could have seen at the foot of the slope, less than a quarter of a
mile away on the steep opposite side, a rectangle of land covering
some fifty acres. It lay crumpled into a rough depression in the
landscape. A rivulet of clear water by virtue of indomitable crook
and turn made its way across this valley; a woodland stood in one
corner, nearly all its timber felled; there were a few patches of
grain so small that they made you think of the variegated peasant
strips of agricultural France; and a few lots smaller still around
a stable.
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