This morning, however, you are not going to the Halfbrook meadow. There is no ice, or none that will bear a man’s weight; and perhaps you would not skate if there were. Do I take you to be too old? No, not that; but you are out of practice. I should hate to see you risking yourself well over on the outer edge, or attempting a sudden turnabout. And you agree with me, I imagine, for you quit the trail at the Town Path (the compositor will please allow the capitals--the path deserves them) and turn your steps northward. The path, I say, deserves a proper name. It is not strictly a highway, I am aware; if you were to stumble into a hole here, the town could not be held liable for damages; but it is a pretty ancient thoroughfare, nevertheless, a reasonably straight course through the woods by the long way of them. Generation after generation has traveled it. You are walking not only in your own footsteps, but in those of your ancestors, who must have gone this way many a time to speak and vote at town meeting. Some of the oldest of them are buried in this very wood, less than half a mile back; a resting-place such as you would like pretty well for yourself when the time comes. You follow the path till it brings you near to a cliff. This is one of the places you had in your eye on setting out. This land is yours, and you have come to look at it. A strange thing it is, an astonishing impertinence, that a man should assume to own a piece of the earth; himself no better than a wayfarer upon it; alighting for a moment only; coming he knows not whence, going he knows not whither. Yet convention allows the claim. Men have agreed to foster one another’s illusions in this regard, as in so many others. They knew, blindly, before any one had the wit to say it in so many words, that “life is the art of being well deceived.” And so they have made you owner of this acre or two of woodland. All the power of the State would be at your service, if necessary, in maintaining the title. These tall pine trees are yours. You have sovereignty over them, to use a word that is just now sweet in the American mouth. You may do anything you like with them. They are older than you, I should guess, and in the order of nature they will long outlive you; for aught I know, also, it may be true, what Thoreau said (profanely, as some thought), that they will go to as high a heaven; but for the time being they have no rights that you are under the slightest obligation to consider. You may kill them to-morrow, and nobody will accuse you of murder. You may turn all their beauty to ashes, and it will be nobody’s business to remonstrate. The trees are yours. I hope, notwithstanding, that you do not quite think so. I would rather believe that you look upon your so-called proprietorship as little more than a convenient legal fiction; of use, possibly, against human trespassers, but having no force as against the right of the trees to live a tree’s life and fulfill a tree’s end.