He wrote of the Masons, "Five magnificent chapters out of an amazing, human book, these beautiful human beings, loving, tender, strong, courageous, dutiful, kind, so like the salt of the sea, the grit of the earth, the sheer face of the cliff." In "Cleophas and His Own", written in Nova Scotia in the fall of 1936 and re-printed in "Marsden Hartley and Nova Scotia," Hartley expresses his immense grief at the tragic drowning of the Mason sons. The independent filmmaker Michael Maglaras made a feature film, "Cleophas and His Own", released in 2005, which uses a personal testament by Hartley as its screenplay.