88 THE JONATHAN PAPERS 



It began, I think, with the sheds. They had 

 in ages past been added one after another by a 

 method of almost unconscious accretion, as 

 the chambered nautilus makes his shell. They 

 looked as if they had been, not exactly built, 

 but rather laid together in the desultory, pro 

 visional fashion of the farmer, and held by an 

 occasional nail, or the natural adhesion of the 

 boards themselves. They leaned confidingly 

 against the great barn and settled comfort 

 ably among the bare faces of rock in the barn 

 yard, as if they had always been there, as, 

 indeed, they had been there longer than any 

 one now living can remember. Neither they 

 nor the barn had ever been painted, and they 

 had all weathered to a silver-gray not the 

 gray of any paint or stain ever made, but the 

 gray that comes only to certain kinds of wood 

 when it has lived out in the rain and the sun 

 shine for fifty, seventy, a hundred years. It is 

 to an old building what white hair is to an old 

 lady. And as not all white hair is beautiful, 

 so not all gray buildings are beautiful. But 

 these were beautiful. When it rained, they 

 grew dark and every knot-hole showed. When 

 the sun came out and baked them dry, they 



