136 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



visitors from alien regions sometimes call them, as 

 they call our doughnuts crullers); and it often seems 

 to me as if my earliest recollections of natural scenes 

 were invariably circumscribed by a line of piled gray 

 field-stone circumscribed but not imprisoned, for al- 

 ways I could climb the wall and look forth over the 

 field beyond to the next one. "Stone walls do not a 

 prison make,*' except for silly cows. But how they 

 rib and pattern our rolling, hilly New England, over 

 dome and dale, in sun and shower, lines of the land- 

 scape as immutable now as the hills themselves ! Every 

 field must be cleared of stones for tillage, and the easiest 

 way to dispose of the stones is to build a wall with 

 them. And how many stones there are! A certain 

 lecturer in Boston used to have a story which never 

 failed to arouse his audience. He was travelling in 

 New Hampshire, he said, and came upon a farmer in a 

 field, with a derrick rigged up over two bowlders parted 

 by a narrow cleft. 



"What are you doing?" he asked the farmer. 



" Wall, there's a blade o* grass down in that gol dern 

 cleft," the farmer replied, "and I gotter git it up be- 

 fore my keow starves." 



"Such is farming in New Hampshire," said this 

 lecturer, thereby proving the hardihood and courage of 

 the New England pioneers. 



From the summit of any of our hills, you see New 

 England as a crazy quilt. Our fields are not laid out 



