STONE WALLS 135 



It seems to me I can still recall the curious look on 

 my grandfather's face, as he answered, quite uncon- 

 scious of Tennyson, "The old ways change. They 

 make cloth in big factories now, and raise sheep by the 

 hundred thousand out West. That old wall is to me a 

 kind of monument." 



His words, of course, had little meaning to my child- 

 ish mind, but his manner curiously impressed me, and 

 I stood silent beside him and looked at the mossy, 

 ruined wall, which ran over ridges and dipped into 

 hollows till it was lost to view in the gloom of the 

 chestnuts and maples. But his words have come back 

 to me since, many and many a time, in my wanderings 

 about New England, and to me, too, an old stone wall 

 suddenly discovered in the heart of the woods is a 

 melancholy monument to the ancient regime, to a 

 vanished order a boundary line which once marked a 

 clearing, invaded now and recaptured by the forest. 

 The corollary of the old wall in the woods is the in- 

 creased population of our cities, it is factories and con- 

 gested industry. It is something curiously and harshly 

 at variance with the immediate scene the mottled 

 shadows of the woods, the throb of a thrush, the sway- 

 ing stems of the Solomon's seal, the chatter of a squirrel 

 running along the green and gray stones and leaping up 

 a trunk which has pushed a whole section of the wall 

 down into a loose heap. 



New England is a land of stone walls (stone fences, 



