"There is something to me peculiarly interesting in stone walls--a kind of rude human expression to them, suggesting the face of the old farmer himself. How they climb the hills and sweep through the valleys. They decay not, yet they grow old and decrepit; little by little they lose their precision and firmness, they stagger, then fall. In a still early spring morning or April twilight one often hears a rattle of stones in a distant field, some bit of old wall is falling. The lifetime of the best of them is rarely threescore and ten. The other day, along the highway, I saw an old man relaying a dilapidated stone wall. `Fifty-three years ago,' he said, `I laid this wall. When it is laid again, I shan't have the job.'"