These things now had passed away, and the first fee-simple of the Hockin family became a mere load and incumbrance. Sir George and Sir Robert and Sir Rufus, one after another, did not like the hints about contraband dealings which met them whenever they deigned to come down there, till at last the estate (being left to an agent) cost a great deal more than he ever paid in. And thus--as should have been more briefly told--the owner was our Major Hockin.
No wonder that this gentleman, with so many cares to attend to, had no time at first to send for me. And no wonder that when he came down to see me, he was obliged to have good dinners. For the work done by him in those three months surprised every body except himself, and made in old Bruntsea a stir unknown since the time of the Spanish Armada. For he owned the house under the eastern cliff, and the warren, and the dairy-farm inland, and the slope of the ground where the sea used to come, and fields where the people grew potatoes gratis, and all the eastern village, where the tenants paid their rents whenever they found it rational.
A hot young man, in a place like this, would have done a great deal of mischief. Either he would have accepted large views, and applauded this fine communism (if he could afford it, and had no wife), or else he would have rushed at every body headlong, and batted them back to their abutments. Neither course would have created half the excitement which the Major's did. At least, there might have been more talk at first, but not a quarter so much in sum total. Of those things, however, there is time enough to speak, if I dare to say any thing about them.
The things more to my mind (and therefore more likely to be made plain to another mind) are not the petty flickering phantoms of the shadow we call human, and which alone we realize, and dwell inside it and upon it, as if it were all creation; but the infinitely nobler things of ever-changing but perpetual beauty, and no selfishness. These, without deigning to us even sense to be aware of them, shape our little minds and bodies and our large self-importance, and fail to know when the lord or king who owns is buried under them. To have perception of such mighty truths is good for all of us: and I never had keener perception of them than when I sat down on the Major's camp-stool, and saw all his land around me, and even the sea--where all the fish were his, as soon as he could catch them--and largely reflected that not a square foot of the whole world would ever belong to me.