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."

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 practi