e in the past ages, I've had something to do with stone-work.
This came to me first with a poignant thrill when I found myself in the
presence of the Chinese Wall. Illusion or not, it seemed as if there
were ancient scars across my back--as if I had helped in that building,
and under the lash, too.

... I heard the mason here tell his tender that he had done a lot of
stone-work, but had never been watched so closely as this. He penetrated
to the truth of the matter presently. I wasn't watching because I was
afraid of short time or flaws of construction--I was watching because it
satisfied something within, that had to do with stone-work. I do not get
accustomed to the marvel of cement. The overnight bond of that heavy
powder, and its terrible thirst, is a continual miracle to me. There is
a satisfaction about stone-work. It is at its weakest at the moment of
setting. If you can find a bearing for one stone upon another without
falling, you may know that every hour that passes for years, your wall
is hardening. These things move slowly, too. All that has to do with
stone-work is a slow process. In the very lifting, the masons learn that
muscles must not tug or jerk, but lift slowly. The mortar that hardens
slowly hardens best.

The study building happened between two long tasks of my own, so that
there was time to be much outdoors. I doubt if there ever was a lovelier
Fall than that--a full year before the thought of Europe became action.
I watched the work--as the Japanese apprentices watch their craftsmen,
so that the mind gets the picture of every process. The hand learns
easily after this.

It is a grand old tool, the trowel, perhaps the most perfect of all
symbols which suggest the labour of man upon the earth, his making of
order out of chaos. The hammers interested me as well--six, eight, and
eighteen pounds. The young man who used them was not much to look at,
his body sagging a bit from labour, set in his opinions like the matter
he dealt with, but terrible in his holding to what he knew, and steadily
increasing that store. I have come to respect him, for he has done a
great deal of stone-work here since those Fall days, when I seemed to be
learning masonry all over again.

"Handle these hard-heads all day, and you're pretty well lifted out by
night," he would remark, and add deprecatingly, "as the feller says."

There's a magic about the breaking. It isn't all strength. I think it is
something the same tha