basement wall. How we go through life, losing most of the beauties of it
from sheer inability to see! But the old man, as he drives about, rarely
sees houses at all, especially wooden houses, and for all modern stucco
and cement work he entertains a kind of lofty contempt. Sham work of a
hasty and unskilled age! He never, I think, put in a shovelful of cement
except in the place where it belongs, as a mortar for good walls, and
never will do so as long as he lives. So long as he lives the standards
of high art will never be debased!

He built that foundation, and this chimney, he worked on the tower of
the Baptist church in the town, "and never yet has there been a crack in
her, winter or summer"; and more than forty years ago he laid the
cornerstone of the old schoolhouse, the foundation walls of which stand
to-day as sound and strong as they were when they were put down.

In dry walls I think the old stone mason takes the greatest pride of
all: for it is in the dry wall--I mean by that a wall laid without
mortar--that the sheer art of the mason comes most into play. Any one
can throw a wall together if he has mortar to make it stick, but a dry
wall must stand out for what it is, built solid from the bottom up, each
stone resting securely upon those below it, and braced and nested in by
the sheer skill of the mason. The art of the dry wall is the ancient
heritage of New England and speaks not only of the sincerity and the
conscientiousness of the old Puritan spirit but strikes the higher note
of beauty. Many of the older walls I know are worth going far to see,
for they exhibit a rare sense of form and proportion, and are sometimes
set in the landscape with a skill that only the Master-Artist himself
could exceed. Those old, hard-wrought stone fences of the Burnham Hills
and Crewsbury, the best of them, were honestly built, and built to last
a thousand years. A beautiful art--and one that is passing away! It is