OLD STONE WALLS 69 



agriculture is decadent, there are so often stone 

 walls laid by some man whose heart beat high with 

 hope and who wrought at his work with conscien- 

 tious care because he felt the artist's pride in his 

 labors and deemed that he built for children's 

 children. I hope that he laid down his good gray 

 head at the last secure in his faith in the land he 

 owned. But his son could never know his father's 

 steadfast faith. He knew that once the fertile 

 lands of the great corn-belt states began to pour 

 their agricultural wealth into the world, the old 

 regime in the East must pass forever. The open- 

 ing up of the Mississippi Basin marked the end of 

 an era in much of the old East, and one of our yet 

 unsolved problems is the readjustment of the eco- 

 nomic and social ills that followed. 



I am thinking now of an old farmstead which is 

 locally famous for its walls. It was only a poor 

 thin farm at best, skirting the narrow valley of a 

 little creek and running far up against the steep 

 and rocky hUlsides. It is such a farm as can never 

 give more than narrow opportunities and then 

 only as the result of grinding toil. Yet on this 

 farm a man spent a long life, and when he died, 

 he left it fenced by high, smooth, straight stone 

 walls. It seems pathetic that a man should so — as 

 we may be tempted to say — have wasted his life. 

 Yet perhaps for him there was compensation in 

 his work. He was a patient sober man of charac- 

 ter and ideals. I know that men called him a good 



