STONE WALLS 137 



on the gridiron plan, like the farms of Illinois. Na- 

 ture was their original architect, and man has followed 

 her design. It was always easiest to roll the stones 

 cleared from field or pasture into the first hollow, so 

 that we have achieved over and over again not only a 

 charming irregularity of pattern, but that most beau- 

 tiful of single effects, the domed field, where zebra 

 stripes curve up against the sky when the first snow 

 scud fills the autumn furrows, and in lush midsummer 

 wave after billowing wave of rye ripple down on the 

 wind against the breakwater of the gray stone wall. 



Ascend any considerable hill in cultivated New 

 England, whether it be in Thoreau's haunts through 

 Middlesex or Monument Mountain in the Berkshires, 

 which Hawthorne and Herman Melville climbed to- 

 gether and which Bryant celebrated in his verse, and 

 you will see the crazy-quilt pattern of fields and pas- 

 tures spread out below you, stitched with stone walls. 

 Golden grain and brown stubble, green pasture and 

 tasselled corn, neglected fields of yellow "hardback," 

 acres where the cows crop and wander amid the great 

 pink laurel shrubs no matter what the season, there is 

 always infinite variety of colour and texture in the dif- 

 ferent patches of the quilt, always an infinite variety in 

 their shape, determined by the contours of the land; and 

 always the stone walls stitch the patches together, the 

 quilt is sewn with gray and green green because every 

 wall is bordered with shrubs and wild flowers. In a hilly 



