Such rocks! Rag-carpets woven in garnet and topaz; petrified Oriental rugs; granites in endless designs of Scotch mixture, as if each bowlder were wearing the plaid of its clan; big, uncouth, scabiose, ignorant-looking hardheads that opened with a heart of rose,--each one a separate album opening to a sample from a different quarry. I have seen cloven field-stone that deserved a hinge and a gold clasp; I have one in sight now which is such a delicate contrast of faintest rose and mere spiritual green that it is like the first blush of dawn. Imagine smiting a rock until the fragments sting you in the face, and then seeing it calmly unfold the two wings of a moth! I have broken into a rock which pleased me so well that I held it in mind in order to match it; but though I had the pick of a hundred and sixty loads that summer I never found another. There is "individuality" for you. Some of them are "niggerheads." These are the hardest rock known to practical experience. There are those that have refused to succumb to the strongest hitters in the country. Some of them will break and others will not; the only way is to try. Fortunately I had had some early training as a blacksmith; but this was as if the smith were trying to break his anvil. I have seen the steel face of a hammer chip off without making a mark on one. And yet the glaciers wore them off to make soil and left them rounded like big pebbles! I never realized what ground is, till I became acquainted with the stones that did the grinding. My fence was eight to ten feet in thickness and shoulder high; and similar windrows of rock ran over the moraine in all directions, like a range upon a range. It is, of course, valuable land that warrants a wall like that. The barley-field might easily have defied a siege-gun on all four sides, for it had had so many bowlders on it that they had been built up into more of a rampart than a windrow. On a near-by field from which the timber had been removed, but which, notwithstanding, was far from "cleared," it looked as if it had hailed bowlders. You could have forded your way across it without putting a foot to ground. I have seen places where the glaciers had deposited rocks in surprising uniformity of size, and as thick as the heads of an audience (a comparison that means no harm, I trust).