t you do in billiards to get that smooth, long
roll without smashing the balls. The mason says it is in the wrist. I
asked him if it was the flash of the heat through the stone that broke
it.

"No, it's just the way you hit it," he answered.

Two old masons worked with him for a time on the later work. They have
built in these parts thousands of tons of brick and stone--fifty years
of masonry; and their order is wonderful. I watched them taking their
stone-hammers to the stable in the evening, and placing them just so.
They have learned their mastery over the heavy things; they have hewed
to the Line, and built to the Square. Their eyes are dim but the essence
of their being (I cannot think it otherwise) is of more orderly
integration. There is a nobility from stone-work which the masons put on
with the years--the tenders have it not; neither have any of the
indiscriminate labour men. One must have a craft to achieve this. The
building is not so much. The houses and barns and stores which the elder
masons pass everywhere as the labour of their hands in this
country--they are but symbols of the building of character within. They
see _into_ the stones, see through their weathered coatings. To another
all would look the same--the blacks and reds and whites, even the
amalgans--all grey-brown and weathered outside--but the masons know what
is within, the colour and grain and beauty.

"Try that one," I might say, looking for a certain fireplace corner.

"No, that's a black feller."

"And this?"

"Good colour, but he ain't got no grain--all _gnurly_--as the feller
says."

Sometime this mason will be able to see like that into the hearts of
men....

A stone study sixteen by twenty-three feet, built about a chimney--faced
stone in and out, windows barred for the vines, six-inch beams to hold a
low gable roof, and a damper in the chimney; the door of oak, wooden
pegs to cover the screw-insets, a few rugs, a few books, the magic of
firelight in the stone cave--a Mediterranean vision of curving shore to
the East, and the single door overhanging the Lake--to the suspense of
distance and Southern constellations.

I laugh at this--it sounds so pompous and costly--but it is the shop of
a poor man. The whole Lake-frontage, as I have told you, cost no more
than a city lot; and with sand on the beach, and stone on the shore and
nearby fields, it all came to be as cheaply as a wooden cabin--indeed,
it had to. That winter after