This is a recollection of seven years as an apprentice stonecarver by a craftsman/artist who became a major Irish sculptor. The young Seamus Murphy, studying modelling at the Crawford School of Art in Cork in the early 1920s, took the unusual step of apprenticing himself to a master stonecarver to learn the ancient craft of the mason. First published in 1966 when Murphy was 59 years old, the book tells the story of his seven years' knowledge of the growing challenges and joys of stone - and of the men who worked it. His artistic feeling for quality responded to his workmates' reverence for the well-made thing, their insistence on the making of the hand before the mind and heart could properly speak.