job." He had stood up longer than had his wall.

A stone wall is the friend of all the wild creatures. It is a safe line
of communication with all parts of the landscape. What do the chipmunks,
red squirrels, and weasels do in a country without stone fences? The
woodchucks and the coons and foxes also use them.

It was my duty as a farm boy to help pick up the stone and pry up the
rocks. I could put the bait under the lever, even if my weight on top of
it did not count for much. The slow, patient, hulky oxen, how they would
kink their tails, hump their backs, and throw their weight into the bows
when they felt a heavy rock behind them and Father lifted up his voice
and laid on the "gad"! It was a good subject for a picture which, I
think, no artist has ever painted. How many rocks we turned out of their
beds, where they had slept since the great ice sheet tucked them up
there, maybe a hundred thousand years ago--how wounded and torn the
meadow or pasture looked, bleeding as it were, in a score of places,
when the job was finished! But the further surgery of the plough and
harrow, followed by the healing touch of the seasons, soon made all
whole again.

The work on the farm in those days varied little from year to year. In
winter the care of the cattle, the cutting of the wood, and the
thrashing of the oats and rye filled the time. From the age of ten or
twelve till we were grown up, we went to school only in winter, doing
the chores morning and evening, and engaging in general work every other
Saturday, which was a holiday. Often my older brothers would have to
leave school by three o'clock to get home to put up the cows in my
father's absence. Those school days, how they come back to me!--the long
walk across lots, through the snow-choked fields and woods, our narrow