Memoirs of an editor : fifty years of American journalism / Edward P. Mitchell.

TO WATCHAPEY

443

clinging oak leaves, with the dark cedars and lighter
pines and sentinel savins, show finely against the white
mantle.
The New England stone walls stretch in every direction; seemingly miles and miles of them, with years of
conscientious skilled labor invested in their construction.
Some must date quite back to Roger Williams and Canonchet. They are found where they are wanted and likewise where they are and always were unnecessary; in
some places delicate as fretwork, in other places Cyclopean
in their massiveness, according to the mood and muscle
of their makers. They record the ceaseless efforts of generations to get the lands required for agriculture clear
of the d6bris of the terminal moraine. Monuments of
industry they are, more lasting than barbed wire or cedar
zigzags; but the art of building them properly has so far
departed from the countryside that few men can now be
trusted with their extension or repair.
The Age of Ice dealt liberally with this region. The
receding glacier deposited reminders of its visit varying
in size from that of a modest man's head to that of a comfortable barn. Some of the big fellows split when they
struck bedrock, leaving fissures as cleanly regular as if
cut by a mason's tools. One great boulder close by is a
tooth-shaped peak like the top of the Matterhorn, cropping fifteen or twenty feet above soil that perhaps conceals twice that much of altitude. Atop the sharp apex,
inaccessible without a ladder to any but a human fly,
there flourishes a considerable pine-tree, the product of
seed sown by a whimsical gust on this hopeless pinnacle.
Yet somehow, in spite of common sense and life-probability tables, the tree has managed to claw into and around

the rock with its hard-pushed roots firmly enough to defy
the blizzards of fifty years. Few of the first comers, the
settlers of this historic coast, could have shown greater
enterprise or tenacity than this squatter pine.