and many of them relaid by him, or rather by his boys and hired men.
Father was not skilful at any sort of craft work. He was a good
ploughman, a good mower and cradler, excellent with a team of oxen
drawing rocks, and good at most general farm work, but not an adept at
constructing anything. Hiram was the mechanical genius of the family. He
was a good wall-layer, and skilful with edged tools. It fell to his lot
to make the sleds, the stone-boats, the hay-rigging, the ax helves, the
flails, to mend the cradles and rakes, to build the haystacks, and once,
I remember, he rebuilt the churning machine. He was slow but he hewed
exactly to the line. Before and during my time on the farm Father used
to count on building forty or fifty rods of stone wall each year,
usually in the spring and early summer. These were the only lines of
poetry and prose Father wrote. They are still very legible on the face
of the landscape and cannot be easily erased from it. Gathered out of
the confusion of nature, built up of fragments of the old Devonian rock
and shale, laid with due regard to the wear and tear of time, well-
bottomed and well-capped, establishing boundaries and defining
possessions, etc., these lines of stone wall afford a good lesson in
many things besides wall building. They are good literature and good
philosophy. They smack of the soil, they have local colour, they are a
bit of chaos brought into order. When you deal with nature only the
square deal is worth while. How she searches for the vulnerable points
in your structure, the weak places in your foundation, the defective
material in your building!

The farmer's stone wall, when well built, stands about as long as he
does. It begins to reel and look decrepit when he begins to do so. But
it can be relaid and he cannot. One day I passed by the roadside to
speak with an old man who was rebuilding a wall. "I laid this wall fifty
years ago," he said. "When it is laid up again I shall not have the