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“But——” began the Squire.

The Economist with increasing irritation waved him down. “Now, listen,” he said; “the worst land has only what is called prairie value.”

The Squire would eagerly have asked the meaning of this, for it suggested coin, but he thought he was bound to listen to the remainder of the story.

“That is only true,” said the Economist, “of the worst land. There is land on which no profit could be made; it neither makes nor loses. It is on what we call the margin of production.”

“What about rates?” said the Squire, looking at that mournful stretch, all closed in and framed with desolation, and suggesting a thousand such others stretching on to the boundaries of a deserted world.

How various are the minds of men! That little word “rates”—it has but five letters; take away the “e” and it would have but four—and what different things does it not mean to different men! To one man the pushing on of his shop just past the edge of bankruptcy; to another the bother of writing a silly little cheque; to another the brand of the Accursed Race of our time—the pariahs, the very poor. To this Squire it meant the dreadful business of paying a great large sum out of an income that never sufficed for the bare needs of his life ... to tell the truth, he always borrowed money for the rates and paid it back out of the next half year ... he had such a lot of land in hand. Years ago, when farms were falling in, in the eighties, a friend of his, a practical man, who went in for silos and had been in the Guards and knew a lot about French agriculture, had told him it would pay him to have his land in hand, so when the farms fell in he consoled himself by what the friend had said; but all these years had passed and it had not paid him.