There is a rough stone wall at the bottom of the Blackmer place in Massachusetts that runs north to south along the forest edge. In New England fashion, it is straight and true despite its age, three stones wide and another three high, a dry-laid bulwark of native schist. The slab-handed dairyman on the place claims that the width implies the boundary of a long-forgotten garden, as the pasture walls of his forebears were built upon the width of a single stone. But that garden is gone now and the flint corn and squash and drying beans that once grew there, like the farm itself, are New England heirlooms. As for the wall, I dare say in the last hundred years it has contained nothing at all except a grown-over section of bittersweet tangle…and a steadfast supply of grouse and woodcock for the unlikely likes of me.