NORTH OF BOSTON

        I'M going out to clean the pasture spring;
        I'll only stop to rake the leaves away
        (And wait to watch the water clear, I may):
        I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.
        I'm going out to fetch the little calf
        That's standing by the mother. It's so young,
        It totters when she licks it with her tongue.
        I sha'n't be gone long.—You come too.

    SOMETHING there is that doesn't love a wall,
    That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,
    And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
    And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
    The work of hunters is another thing:
    I have come after them and made repair
    Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
    But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
    To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
    No one has seen them made or heard them made,
    But at spring mending-time we find them there.
    I let my neighbour know beyond the hill;
    And on a day we meet to walk the line
    And set the wall between us once again.
    We keep the wall between us as we go.
    To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
    And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
    We have to use a spell to make them balance:
    "Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
    We wear our fingers rough with handling them.
    Oh, just another kind of out-door game,
    One on a side. It comes to little more:
    There where it is we do not need the wall:
    He is all pine and I am apple orchard.
    My apple trees will never get across
    And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
    He only says, "Good fences make good neighbours."
    Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
    If I could put a notion in his head:
    "Why do they make good neighbours? Isn't it
    Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
    Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
    What I was walling in or walling out,
    And to whom I was like to give offence.
    Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
    That wants it down." I could say "Elves" to him,
    But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
    He said it for himself. I see him there
    Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
    In each hand, like an old-stone savage armed.
    He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
    Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
    He will not go behind his father's saying,
    And he likes having thought of it so well
    He says again, "Good fences make good neighbours."

    MARY sat musing on the lamp-flame at the table
    Waiting for Warren. When she heard his step,
    She ran on tip-toe down the darkened passage
    To meet him in the doorway with the news
    And put him on his guard. "Silas is back."
    She pushed him outward with her through the door
    And shut it after her. "Be kind," she said.
    She took the market things from Warren's arms
    And set them on the porch, then drew him down
    To sit beside her on the wooden steps.
    "When was I ever anything but kind to him?
    But I'll not have the fellow back," he said.
    "I told him so last haying, didn't I?
    'If he left then,' I said, 'that ended it.'
    What good is he? Who else will harbour him
    At his age for the little he can do?
    What help he is there's no depending on.
    Off he goes always when I need him most.
    'He thinks he ought to earn a little pay,
    Enough at least to buy tobacco with,
    So he won't have to beg and be beholden.'
    'All right,' I say, 'I can't afford to pay
    Any fixed