STONE WALLS 143 



The split rail, or Virginia fence, is a relic of a happy 

 day when we could afford to be prodigal with lumber 

 or thought we could. It was never common in New 

 England, though not unknown. I well recall one 

 where the quail nested in the corners, and every alter- 

 nate triangle of the snake line was a mass of blackcap 

 raspberries. The whip-poor-wills used to sing upon it, 

 too, in the summer evenings a melancholy song which 

 always affected me with that indefinable Weltschmerz 

 peculiar to adolescence. But we all know that Lincoln 

 split the rails for such fences in Illinois, where a stone is 

 as rare as a hill to coast on, and in Virginia itself you 

 may still see them, mellowed by time, overgrown and 

 flower-bordered, exactly comporting with the long 

 horizontals of the pines and the roof trees of the negro 

 cabins. One such fence I have never forgotten. Two 

 of us had come out of the Dismal Swamp, upon the 

 western side, or "the coast," as it is called. It had been 

 a hard tramp out, through the damp heat of the almost 

 tropic swamp growth, in mud half up to our knees. We 

 emerged upon the sandy road at sunset time, and a 

 cool, fresh breeze was stirring from the higher regions as 

 we turned south. To our right was the old rail fence, 

 zigzagging along to keep us company, with some un- 

 known flower blooming, and as it seems to me now 

 faintly fragrant, in the alternate angles. Behind this 

 fence were the level fields, some bearing cotton, some 

 corn, but most of them filled with row on row of the 



