To-day I rode over with the old stone mason to select some wide stones
for steps in my new building. The old man loves stones. All his life
long--he is now beyond seventy years old--he has lived among stones,
lifted stones, fitted stones. He knows all the various kinds, shapes,
sizes, and where they will go best in a wall. He can tell at a glance
where to strike a stone to make it fit a particular place, and out of a
great pile he can select with a shrewd eye the stone for the exact
opening he has to fill. He will run his stubby rough hand over a stone
and remark:

"Fine face that. Ye don't see many such stones these days," as though he
were speaking of the countenance of a friend.

I veritably believe there are stones that smile at him, stones that
frown at him, stones that appear good or ill-humoured to him as he bends
his stocky strong body to lift or lay them. He is a slow man, a slow,
steady, geologic man, as befits one who works with the elemental stuff
of nature. His arms are short and his hands powerful. He has been a
servant of stones in this neighbourhood alone for upward of fifty years.

He loves stones and can no more resist a good stone than I a good book.
When going about the country, if he sees comely stones in a wayside
pile, or in a fine-featured old fence he will have them, whether or no,
and dickers for them with all the eagerness, sly pride, and
half-concealed cunning with which a lover of old prints chaffers for a
Seymour Haden in a second-hand book shop. And when he has bought them he
takes the first idle day he has, and with his team of old horses goes
into the hills, or wherever it may be, and brings them down. He has them
piled about his barn and even in his yard, as another man might have
flower beds. And he can tell you, as he told me to-day, just where a