◆ SpookStack

ea I ee ee eo att eee Ft fem “Sure,” he said, “the house was demolished forty years ago and the Statler Hotel is now erected on the spot.” “Well”, I said, “let’s motor to the Statler Hotel, go down to the cellar and find a loose stone there or pry loose a brick or a piece of the foundation.” “You don't have to do that”, he said, “Just after you and I left college, I was going home from a party ate one night and passed the Millard Fillmore house which was in the process of demolition. I got out and “swiped” a brick and brought it home. It has been on my desk ever since as an oversized paper weight, For thirty years my wife has urged me to throw it away. She says it looks like any other old brick and spoils the looks of the room.” Now I suppose that of the 120 million people living in the United States, Billy Olmstead was the only one that had a stone from the home of Fillmore. I leave it to the reader to explain what was the coincidence by which I happened to meet and broach the subject of my quest to the only man who could help me. Many, if not most of those whose names are inscribed on the stones, may have actually handled or stepped upon the stones. I saw personally Sinclair Lewis, Charles M. Sheldon, and others do so. Oliver Wendell Holmes washed his face every day during his summer vacations on a marble- topped. washstand in his sister’s home at Salem, Mass. A brokgat piece of that marble is in our “Walk”. haps the most fascinating fact about these stones is that @lthough they are of no intrinsic value, yet each one of thedg fs eloquent with suggestion and inspiration. Cer- tainly these “rocks their silence break”, No human being can walk amidst these symbols of immortality without something stealing over him akin to the spirit pervading the Poet’s Corner in Westminster Abbey. And, by the way, we have a stone actually from the Poet’s Corner of West- minster Abbey, but there are so many names that could be carved on it that we have simply inscribed the place. Geologically speaking, there are no two stones alike. One who is not a geologist imagines, I dare say, that stones are chard grayish substances, all more or less alike, But nothing ig farther from the truth. No two stones in the “Walk” have the same texture or color, Indeed, every color of the rainbow is represented—from the white marble stones of Socrates, Plato and Aristotle from the Agora, the Acade- my, and the Lyceum at Athens, the pink stones of St. Paul from Mars Hill, the yellow stones uf Kubert F. Lee, the red stones of John Muir, the blue stones ol Benjamin Franklin, to the black stone of Jose Rizal, the Filipine patriot. At the head of the “Walk of Fame” is an upright mill- stone weighing several tons which I obtained from a mill in the neighborhood of my summer home in Woodstock, Connecticut. On this stone is carved in large letters “Walk of Fame”, and under it the famous quotation from Shake- speare, “Sermons in stones and good in everything”. _If you, gentle reader, have any stones you can send us —stones from the homes where people of recognized fame were born, lived or died—we shall most gratefully receive them. Our ambition’ is to have every man or woman, living or dead, whose services deserve the eternal remembrance of mankind, represented in our Walk.