As we drove along the road the old man pointed out to me with his stubby whip so many examples of his work that it seemed finally as if he had borne a hand in nearly everything done in this neighbourhood in the last half-century.  He has literally built himself into the country and into the town, and at seventy years of age he can look back upon it all with honest pride.  It stands.  No jerry-work anywhere.  No cracks.  It stands.

I never realized before how completely the neighbourhood rests upon the work of this simple old man.  He founded most of the homes here, and upon his secure walls rest many of the stores, the churches, and the schools of the countryside.  I see again how important each man is to the complete fabric of civilization and know that we are to leave no one out, despise no one, look down upon no one.

He told me stories of this ancient settler and of that.

He was a powerful queer man—­he wanted the moss left on his stones when I put ’em in; never a hammer touched the facings of his wall...

“That is properly a woman’s wall.  She was the boss, you might call it, and wanted stone, but he wanted brick.  So you see the front, where people can see it, is of stone, but the sides is all brick.”

Thus like the true artist that he is, he has not only built himself his own honesty, truth, skill, into the town, but he has built in the inexhaustible peculiarities, the radiant charm, the hates and the loves, of the people of this place.  He has mirrored his own little age in stone.  He knows the town, indeed, better than most of us, having a kind of stone-age knowledge of it—­the fundamental things men build in when they set about building permanently.

“And that is what you might call a spite-wall,” said he, showing me a long wall leading between two shady homes, making one of them a prison on the south, and the other a prison on the north.  He told me the story of an ancient and bitter quarrel between two old friends, a story which sounded to-day among spring blossoms like the account of some ancient baronial feud.

But if the old stone mason has built walls to keep enemies apart how many more walls has he built to keep friends together?  How many times has he been consulted by shy lovers seeking a foundation for a new home, a new family, how many times by Darby and Joan planning a resting place for the sunny closing years of their lives!  He could point, indeed, to one wall that symbolized hatred; all the others meant homes, roof-trees, families, or they were the foundations for the working places of men, or else, like the tower of the church, they pointed heavenward and were built to the glory of God.

The old stone mason has not the slightest idea that he has done anything unusual or wonderful.  He is as simple and honest a man as ever I knew; and if he has pride, simple and honest also in that.  He was anxious not to charge me too much for the stone I bought—­in an age like this!  I have never talked with him about God, or about religion:  I had no need to.