"I suppose you read that in one of those agricultural experiment station pamphlets," I said. Many things that I consider disasters on the farm can be traced to one or another of these little pamphlets, and when a new one arrives I regard it with resignation but without cordiality. The sheds went, and I missed them. Possibly the hens missed them too. They wandered thoughtfully about the barnyard, stepping rather higher than usual, cocking their heads and regarding me with their red-rimmed eyes as if they were cluckfully conjuring up old associations. Did they remember Durance Vile? Perhaps, but probably not. For all their philosophic airs and their attitudinizing, I know nobody who thinks less than a hen, or, at all events, their thinking is contemplative rather than practical. Jonathan also surveyed the raw spot. But Jonathan's mind is practical rather than contemplative. "Just the place for a carriage-house," he remarked. And the carriage-house was perpetrated. Perhaps a hundred years from now it will have been assimilated, but at present it stands out absolutely undigested in all its uncompromising newness of line and color. Its ridgepole, its roof edges, its corners, look as if they had been drawn with a ruler, where those of the old barn were sketched freehand. The barn and the sheds had settled into the landscape, the carriage-house cut into it. Even Jonathan saw it. "We'll paint it the old-fashioned red to make it more in keeping," he said apologetically. But old-fashioned red is apparently not to be had in new-fashioned cans. And the farm remained implacable: it refused to digest the carriage-house. I felt rather proud of the farm for being so firm. The next blow was a heavy one. In the middle of the cowyard there was a wonderful gray rock, shoulder high, with a flat top and three sides abrupt, the other sloping. I used to sit on this rock and feed the hens and watch the "critters" come into the yard at milking-time. I like "critters," but when there are more than two or three in the yard, including some irresponsible calves, I like to have some vantage-point from which to view them--and be viewed. Our cattle are always gentle, but some of them are, to use a colloquial word that seems to me richly descriptive, so "nose-y." Of course a rock like this did not belong in a well-planned barnyard. Nowhere, except in New England, or perhaps in Switzerland, would one occur. But in our part of New England they occur so thickly that they are hard to dodge, even in building a house. I remember an entry in an old ledger discovered in the attic: "To blasten rocks in my sollor--L0 3 6."