Without doubt the rock was in the way. Jonathan used to speak about it in ungentle terms every time he drove in and turned around. But this gave me no anxiety, because I felt sure that it had survived much stronger language than his. I did not think about dynamite. Probably when the Psalmist wrote about the eternal hills he did not think about dynamite either. And dynamite did the deed. It broke my pretty rock into little pieces as one might break up a chunk of maple sugar with a pair of scissors. It made a beautiful barnyard, but I missed my refuge, my stronghold. But this was only the beginning. Back of the barns lay the farm itself--scores of acres, chiefly rocks and huckleberry bushes, with thistles and mullein and sumac. There were dry, warm slopes, where the birches grew; not the queenly paper birch of the North, but the girlish little gray birch with its veil of twinkling leaves and its glimmer of slender stems. There were rugged ledges, deep-shadowed with oak and chestnut; there were hot, open hillsides thick-set with cat-brier and blackberry canes, where one could never go without setting a brown rabbit scampering. It was a delectable farm, but not, in the ordinary sense, highly productive, and its appeal was rather to the contemplative than to the practical mind. Jonathan was from the first infected with the desire of making the farm more productive--in the ordinary sense; and one day, when I wandered up to a distant corner, oh, dismay! There was a slope of twinkling birches--no longer twinkling--prone! Cut, dragged, and piled up in masses of white stems and limp green leafage and tangled red-brown twigs! It was a sorry sight. I walked about it much, perhaps, as my white hens had walked about the barnyard, and to as little purpose. For the contemplative mind is no match for the practical. I knew this, yet I could not forbear saying, later:-- "Jonathan, I was up near the long meadow to-day." "Were you?" "O Jonathan! Those birches!" "What about them?" "All cut!" "Oh, yes. We need that piece for pasturage." "Oh, dear! We might as well not have a farm if we cut down all the birches." "We might as well not have a farm if we don't cut them down. They'll run us out in no time." "They don't look as if they would run anybody out--the dears!" "Why, I didn't know you felt that way about them. We'll let that other patch stand, if you like." "_If_ I like!" I saved the birches, but other things kept happening. I went out one day and found one of our prettiest fence lines reduced to bare bones, all its bushes and vines--clematis, elderberry, wild cherry, sweet-fern, bitter-sweet--all cut, hacked, torn away. It looked like a collie dog in the summer when his long yellow fur has been sheared off. And, another day, it was a company of red lilies escaped along a bank above the roadside. There were weeds mixed in, to be sure, and some bushes, a delightful tangle--and all snipped, shaved to the skin!