146 GREEN TRAILS AND UPLAND PASTURES 



egotistical transposition!), though Ruskin did not 

 know the stone wall in his picture, only the dome of 

 pasture. 



The road to the Ipswich meadows led down a slope 

 and across a considerable cultivated plain, almost en- 

 tirely rich, alluvial grass land. It was carefully kept 

 and trimmed with a scythe behind the machine, to se- 

 cure every blade of grass close up to the walls and fences. 

 There were no hedgerows here. On the way down I 

 never noticed my particular stone wall, or, if I did, it 

 was only to wonder how it could be so tame and com- 

 monplace from this viewpoint. But after the swim, 

 lazy with too long immersion in warm fresh water, and 

 with the hot rays of the noonday sun baking on our 

 necks and sending up films of heat from the railroad bed 

 which ran through the bottom land, we would cross the 

 plain slowly, the hay cutters clicking like giant grass- 

 hoppers in the fields, and then I would see my wall and 

 feel its wonder. 



It was a bare, gray, naked wall, cresting the ridge of 

 the plain against the sky, and the green meadows and 

 fields were like a long billow of the land gradually 

 swelling up into a wave crest, with the gray wall as the 

 foam. At first I thought of it as a wonderful place to 

 shelter a defending regiment, while we boys were the 

 enemy Pickett's men, perhaps charging across the 

 level. But the impress of a great wave of the land 

 gradually grew stronger and captured my whole im- 



