STONE WALLS 145 



the brook. It seems a little incredible that so many 

 Yankees could have been ignorant of the persistence of 

 the will-to-live in willows or was it their Puritan way 

 of serving beauty under the deception of utilitarianism? 

 Beauty they did serve, at any rate, for the fence posts 

 always lived and grew into a noble row of trunks, bi- 

 ennially cut back to a head an axe-reach above the 

 ground, and so always bristling with a great cluster of 

 rich, glossy leaf stalks in Summer and with tawny, naked 

 spears in Winter, shining on a dull day over the snow 

 and the icy brook like a bit of captured sunlight. And 

 what whistles they made in the Spring! I wonder how 

 many of my readers could make a willow whistle now? 

 I believe the art is lost. 



There is one bit of old stone wall I have not yet 

 spoken of, keeping it till the last in my memories of 

 walls and fences. It was some two miles from my boy- 

 hood home, on the way to a certain desirable swimming 

 hole in the Ipswich River, and the recollection of it is 

 still so vivid in my brain that I can call up the exact 

 sensations it evoked, though I have not looked upon it 

 now these twenty years. It could not, however, have 

 been without its counterparts elsewhere, and I have 

 often wondered if its effect upon me in boyhood is not a 

 remembered possession of many another New England 

 lad. Curiously enough, in later years, I found that 

 Ruskin had shared with me my emotions (the force of 

 my original sensation is such that I am compelled to the 



