My Boyhood | Page 8

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 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 path so often obliterated by a fresh fall of snow; the cutting
winds, the bitter cold, the snow squeaking beneath our frozen cowhide
boots, our trousers' legs often tied down with tow strings to keep the
snow from pushing them up above our boot tops; the wide-open white
landscape with its faint black lines of stone wall when we had passed
the woods and began to dip down into West Settlement valley; the
Smith boys and Bouton boys and Dart boys, afar off, threading the
fields on their way to school, their forms etched on the white hillsides,
one of the bigger boys, Ria Bouton, who had many chores to do,
morning after morning running the whole distance so as not to be late;
the red school house in the distance by the roadside with the dark spot
in its centre made by the open door of the entry way; the creek in the
valley, often choked with anchor ice, which our path crossed and into
which I one morning slumped, reaching the school house with my
clothes freezing upon me and the water gurgling in my boots; the boys
and girls there, Jay Gould among them, two thirds of them now dead
and the living scattered from the Hudson to the Pacific; the teachers
now all dead; the studies, the games, the wrestlings, the baseball--all
these things and more pass before