OLD STONE WALLS 67 



barbed wire fence. You cannot even moralize on 

 it. You avoid it and go around on the other side. 

 It may have an air of smart newness but nothing 

 more. A stone wall is lovely in decay. It is al- 

 ways a text-book of geology, and it is a sure founda- 

 tion for dreams and memories. I wonder whether 

 I could love a farm that had no stone walls. 

 There is a sort of artificial beauty in a carefully 

 trained hedge beside a velvet lawn, but there is 

 genuine poetry in a moss-grown and tumbled-down 

 stone wall in a pasture, especially if there be a 

 cow-path beside it. A stretch of such wall sug- 

 gests a volume of farm history. 



So while a stranger or my friend sees only some 

 acres of grassy hillside with old trees and rocks 

 and ancient walls, I see more. I see a stalwart 

 pioneer chopping out a place for the home and the 

 log cabin rising in the clearing. I see the first 

 wheat crop growing bronze and golden with black- 

 ening stumps amid it like tiny islands in a yellow 

 sea. I see the cabin become a home because there 

 is a woman happy in her toil and sturdy children 

 playing by the door. I watch the years slip past 

 and the domain of the farmer broaden as he pushes 

 the forest further back from his hearth-stone. I 

 behold him and his sons and his men and his ox- 

 team — always the ox-team — as he clears the land 

 of stones and piles them up into walls, monuments 

 to his time. I see him through the rich years of 

 his prime while his family is growing up, wres- 



