Page:Traveler from Altruria, Howells, 1894.djvu/188

182 place when we were young married people, and began working to pay for it. We wanted to feel that it was ours, that we owned it, and that our children should own it afterwards. We both worked all day long like slaves, and many a moonlight night we were up till morning, almost, gathering the stones from our fields, and burying them in deep graves that we had dug for them. But we buried our youth, and strength, and health in those graves, too, and what for? I don't own the farm that we worked so hard to pay for, and my children won't. That is what it has all come to. We were rightly punished for our greed, I suppose. Perhaps no one has a right to own any portion of the earth. Sometimes I think so, but my husband and I earned this farm, and now the savings bank owns it. That seems strange, doesn't it? I suppose you'll say that the bank paid for it. Well, perhaps so; but the bank didn't earn it. When I think of that I don't always think that a person who pays for his breakfast has the best right to a breakfast."

I could see the sophistry of all this, but I had not the heart to point it out; I felt the pathos of it, too. Mrs. Makely seemed not to see the one nor to feel the other, very distinctly. "Yes, but surely," she said,