T was a rainy April day in the hills of the Côte-d'Or, the heart of the old province of Burgundy. I had trusted to the direction of a foot-path through the woods to take me a short cut from one smooth white road to another. At a moment when my mind was absorbed in thought that left me scarcely aware of my surroundings there rose to the surface of consciousness a haunting sense that any turn of the path might bring me out in some corner of my own New England hillside fields, or a familiar spot thereto adjacent. It was the sort of feeling that would have come from some accustomed odor, as that of sweet-fern. I looked up, and found myself in the presence of a neglected field and a stone wall that was quite unlike the solid, regular masonry of the vineyard walls on the lower slopes. It was of field stone, rounded, weathered, lichened, laid loosely, as if to clear the field rather than to make a boundary. I paused only a moment to look; I was urged to hurry on by premonitions of an impending wave of homesickness.

"Something there is that does not love a wall." It may be so, but "Lordinges, by your leve, that am nat I," and I give you my word it is n't the chipmunk. Observation tells me that it is the highway surveyor. I know he destroys them; buys, begs, steals, borrows them to make roads. I don't

know what his theory is; perhaps he loves them and thinks they are dead, for he lays them reverently in the right of way, "looking as if they were alive," and buries them decently in sand. I can't believe that he loves roads, either; I doubt if he loves anything but his job. It must be just his nature, "loving not, hating not, just choosing so"; or rather "working by rote in his unweeting way," for it can't be that he prefers for his own use such roads as he makes out of old walls. I enjoy hearing his car go over them; it sounds like a tin-shop off Monhegan. I do not mind the roads myself, for I go afoot, but I do love the walls, the kind they make roads of, the plain, bucolic, Snout-the-tinker, New England wall, with more of loam than of plaster or rough-cast about its broad bottom.

I do not believe the farmer loves the walls, either. I can't be sure, because my neighbors are not so much farmers as philosophers and other gentlemen of leisure who cultivate the soil a little when they find any on their premises that is suitable for the purpose. But à priori I should say that a farmer either would have imagination or would have none. If he has imagination, he sees in the walls a memorial to the rockiness of the fields and the painful toil of clearing them. If he has none, he thinks of nothing but the amount of space the walls occupy, and is glad to see all that old stone go off the premises. Besides.

old walls are too hospitable to make good fences, especially when mended, as characteristically they are, with a birch- or alder-tree cut and thrown on the weak spot. Whatever the reason, I have yet to see the inhabitant of this region-except myself that will not part with his walls at the mysterious will of the highway surveyor. My interest in the landscape is not like that of my neighbors, for it is largely sentimental. Even the bit of it I own I do not farm for anything but cord-wood, literature, and a few apples. It is crisscrossed with walls containing stone enough to build a castle. The highway surveyor has hinted that he would pay cash, and Heaven knows I need it, though not so much as my imagination needs the walls.

Along the highways the old walls are nearly hidden by dusty goldenrod, joepye-weed, jewel-weed, and tall white lettuce, overrun with grape or overarched with blackberries. They undulate over hillsides, where puffs of warm wind bring scent of blueberryleaves, bay, and sweet-fern baking in the

sun.

On moist borders of woods they are nearly overtopped by long feathers of lady-fern and cinnamon-fern. Each wall has its record of human character and

human purpose. One will be nearly as wide as the narrow road it borders, and only half as high as it is wide. It has two faces of big boulders, each face a respectable wall in itself, with the "dornicks" thrown in between. At intervals the facing has toppled down, and the amorphous insides have rolled helplessly out. It is not a memorial of the builder's art, but of the industry of the man who tried to make a farm out of the dump-heap of the glacier. One images an ant trying to handle a carload of coal. There are uncounted tons of stone in that wall, and the man lifted every pound of it twice; he put it on the stone-boat, and he took it off again. Here where he built his scrap-heap I see his cenotaph commemorating heroic, but misguided, labor; its inscription is the word spoken of the bull that attacked the locomotive, "I admire his courage, but damn his judgment."

Another tells a different story. Here labored a man who wanted an enduring

barrier, and his was no prentice hand at laying it up. One imagines him working skilfully and quickly, ready judgment saving waste labor, keeping the hired man and the oxen busy with the stoneboat, speeding them with pointed jibes as long as they are within hearing. It is of field stone scarcely touched by the hammer, except for a boulder here and there riven by the bursting sledge, and set with its twin faces showing side by side, like butterfly wings. Every stone is rightly placed for stability, looking as if divine Providence had shaped it to the builder's hand; whereas, if you ever tried to build a wall, you know that Providence is anything but divine in that particular, and you are quite ready to take off your hat to the man whose wall even remotely suggests such an idea.

One wall we have on our road the fellow of which I have yet to find. It is a retaining wall round two sides of a knoll of smooth lawn where stands a white story-and-a-half farm-house, with one sturdy chimney exactly in the midIdle of its broad roof. That wall will be standing when the trump of doom sounds, unless the highway surveyor gets hold of it, and I hope that the trumpet will sound for him first. It was built with loving care, with a forward look to a wedding and a long vista of busy, cheerful years, the care a man has for his work on the first dwelling-place he calls his own, that shall in his thought mean to his children what his father's house means to him. It is of accurately dressed stone, flat layers of gneiss, leveled, staggered, and coped. Where it bounds the side yard the ground lies flat, but in front, facing the road, there is a gentle rise. The coping is parallel with the ground, but below it the courses are laid horizontal on the sloping side as well as on the level side. The corner is handsomely rounded, each stone cut nicely to the quarter-circle. It has every appearance of being an old wall, moreover, I cannot believe that any man in the last seven decades would have put so much work into it,—— but frost has not heaved it or water undercut it. I can answer personally for the last dozen years, during which I have watched it like a guardian in my

frequent passings. Sometimes I stop to talk with the owner about it. He does not know who built it, but he is learning to be as proud of it as I am, he as owner, I as discoverer.

My dog does not like this wall so well as others in the neighborhood. In general he is as fond of an old wall as I am, but he loves it as a woodpecker loves a dead tree, for what he thinks he can get out of it. Tim is a terrier and an Irishman; he has the imagination of a Celt and all the dear illusions of youth. His zest for stone walls is eager and unquenchable; each is a fresh adventure every time he goes over the road. At sight of a familiar wall that he has investigated minutely a dozen times a week all summer he affects a glad surprise. "Whisht!" he exclaims, or "Begorra!" or words to that effect, “a jewel of a wall! Who could have guessed it!" And at it he flies, his stump tail vibrating three hundred and sixty strokes to the minute, like a sucking lamb's. His inquisitive nose, bound in half-black morocco, he thrusts into every crevice, his nostrils quivering with delight at the happy smells with which the stones are (to him) impregnated. I suspect that he gets drunk from inhaling the odor of chipmunk, for I never knew him to find anything else in a wall except once, when a yellow-jacket scored on the tip of his nose; but that did not deter him long from his indulgence in the delirious "stone fence." Aside from the chipmunk, I never actually observed any inhabitants of the wall beyond spiders, ants, and two kinds of snakes, interesting enough, but not to my senses inebriating. I have seen both rabbit and woodchuck disappear in the mass of interrupted fern and blackberry that clothes the base of my orchard wall, but I never had any reason to think that they entered the wall itself. I believe that the woodchuck has behind the ferns a concealed line of retreat to his burrow, of which Tim and I know the entrance well, twelve yards east a point south from the snowapple-tree, under a tag-alder-bush that has no more business there than has the woodchuck himself.

The old wall is hospitable. It keeps no one out unless it be some clumsy

female, such as a woman in high heels and narrow skirt or a cow. It is kind to twilight lovers. Its irregularities are not so slippery as those of the horsehair of the "best room," its seclusion no less, and its atmosphere has more of poetry than formality. Of course lovers need little but themselves of which to make their heaven, but to my thought the park benches are poor things compared with a wall I know cushioned with pine needles, where the wood-thrush sings, or another that in May is hung with fairy constellations of flowering dogwood. To all comers old walls offer rest for eye and body. Of their soft hues I dare not say much lest I write a whole chapter. The softness must come from the blending medium, for most of the lichen patches are really brilliant when detached and laid on a black background. It was the Red-Admiral butterfly that told me this. He was sunning himself on a gray-green surface of my wall, and I did not see him till he slowly lifted his wings. Then first I saw protective coloring in the glowing red ring with which he is marked, for the pattern it made to the eye was that of the crimped edges of a lichen patch. As a rest for the body my neighbor philosophers know well the properties of the wall, but one firm principle of mine is not in their books: not to perch on its top or on any of its hard surfaces, but to sit on the ground at its base and use it as a rest for back and head. This principle was revealed to me early in life, and if I have by now, as I have been assured, an accurate eye for the spot which will fit the contours of the body, it comes from years of conscientious practice. "Sothe, it wolde be game to tellen al" that might be told of the pleasure of a reflective pipe smoked on the shady side of a wall in midsummer, "or if the earlier season lead" to the sunny side, in the kindly warmth of spring or autumn sunshine.

A stone wall is like a work of art in one respect: you don't appreciate it to the full, and are hardly qualified as a critic, until you have performed the creative act yourself. Before this experience you may assent as to a platitude to the assertion that the wall expresses the character of the builder. After the

are

experience, as you review your handiwork, you look upon it as a betrayal. Are you choleric? You will be, perhaps literally, "nettled and stung with pismires" ere you have built a yard's length of wall. Are you placid and reflective? You will not build a yard in a week. If you are testy, work beyond earshot of your wife and children, for no Christian vocabulary can stand the strain of refractory and infractible stone, finger-nails split and torn despite gloves, skin worn mercilessly down till the blood oozes through. And finally the crisis no words can match when the big flat rock you are upending twitches out of your raw fingers and reduces your toe to incoherence. You hop one-legged to the house and spend a week with your foot on a chair; if the wall is built, the stone mason builds it. If you phlegmatic, you begin with elaborate preliminary surveys; you collect stone, and waste time sorting it by shapes and sizes. Despite your sorting, you soon come to a point where you want a stone, exactly such and such, that is not in your collection. You saw one last week, just the thing; it must have been out there in the south wall of the wood-lot. You go to hunt for it, spend a delightful half-day prowling along the borders of your domain, and then-well, I can hear you saying to your friends, "Yes, I intended to have a wall there, but somehow I never got round to finishing it." And if the building process reveals human character, how much more it reveals the character of the stone! When you have struggled with "dornicks" from under the glacier, obstinate balls of quartz, flint, and granite the shape and size of your head, how you bless the docile layers with clean, parallel cleavage lines!

In my aimless explorations of the woods that cover much of the land between one of my horizons and the other, I sometimes come on bits of wall that linger in my memory for no reason

I can name except the certainty that they are forgotten by every one else. Going through a bit of woods that looks as if no one ever had gone through it, fighting tangles of laurel and horse-brier so close woven that I am sure no other fool in Christendom ever tried to force them, I find a long, low cumulus of half-buried stone which at first I take for a rib of the hill itself. It is a stone wall, and yonder is another at right angles. I look at the trees, and guess that not for the better part of a century has man inhabited here. Among birch and chestnut stand four door-yard locusts, and beyond the wall, which perhaps bounded the orchard, is a hollow trunk which was unmistakably an apple-tree. On the road to Lexington and Concord inscribed stones mark spots where men suffered and died; I have passed them as heedlessly as if they were trolley-poles. But here in the woods the old stone wall, unlettered and without tongue, moves me for the old and far-off things that befell men and women to me nameless, as ghosts and memories of ghosts might stir the spirit more than the acts and bodies of men. When next I see the owner of the land I ask him about it.

"Who ever had a house in your big wood-lot over on Turnip Hill?"

His look challenges my sanity. "Ain't never been a house on Turnip Hill since the Lord God made it."

So, then, I have seen the haunting spirit of a farm; it is a stone wall.

The symphony of the stone wall as it comes to me in the hills begins with a theme of indomitable energy sustained by hope and mighty power of will. The second movement is tragic; its motif expresses wasted energy and lost hope. In the third movement the theme softens to an autumnal melancholy, wan sunshine, a suggestion of gathered forces and promise for the future. The fourth movement is not yet written.