. Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist. was written, though the words of thepoem do not say so, nor, I fancy, did the authorrealize it. The water from the old well cooled thethroat of his memory with these and sparkled withthem to the eye of it as he recalled the drippingbucket. Without the background there were nopicture, however we forget it in the vivid figures inthe foreground. The background of Woodworthspicture remains much as he left it when, a boy inhis teens, he started for Boston to make the for-tune he was later to find in New York. Of thefigures he painted in the immediate foregrou
. Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist. was written, though the words of thepoem do not say so, nor, I fancy, did the authorrealize it. The water from the old well cooled thethroat of his memory with these and sparkled withthem to the eye of it as he recalled the drippingbucket. Without the background there were nopicture, however we forget it in the vivid figures inthe foreground. The background of Woodworthspicture remains much as he left it when, a boy inhis teens, he started for Boston to make the for-tune he was later to find in New York. Of thefigures he painted in the immediate foreground,some remain vivid still, after the lapse of a cen-tury. It is not so with the orchard. The greattrees that still bear good fruit that they toss overinto the lane up by the old barn are vigorous in anold age that might well seem to go back and includethe beginning of the nineteenth century, but itdoes not. The trees were planted since the poetsday. One tree only of the orchard he knew re-mains. That stands just within the wall at the. K 6 3 .a bm c J= o. o. 0 u ■a o aj XI aj JI ; 1 « T3 u O O J3 ;—| rt 5 .t^ -n U-H o o u £ s o THE OLD OAKEN BUCKET 115 road, a stones toss from the well, bearing on itstopmost growth old-fashioned russets. But thistree was top-grafted some time in the early yearsof the last century. Before that it was of a nowforgotten varietyk known to our great-grand-fathers as high top. Of late sprouts frombelow the graft on this old tree have come to ma-turity, and the visitor to the place may taste thesame apples, with their sweet and pleasant flavor,that pleased the palate of the poet a century andmore ago. The old oaken bucket itself has passed and beenreplaced many a time since Woodworths day; thewooden well-curb and the sweep, swinging in theupright crotch, have come and gone and comeagain. Curb and bucket and sweep are there to-day, similar in form and appearance no doubt andequally useful for the drawing of water, as nearlike those of which the
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Keywords: ., bookcentury1900, bookdecade1910, booki, booksubjectnaturalhistory
