Page:Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist (IA literarypilgrima00packrich).pdf/156

 "The cot of my father, the dairy house nigh it, And e'en the rude bucket that hung in the well"

are gone, but the old barn still stands in its wonted place and to it come the cattle by the same old lane, the cattle lane that has been such since that pioneer set the gray stones as a fence on either side of it nearly three hundred years ago. Up and down this lane the farm boys of one generation after another have whistled and dreamed dreams while the cattle went quickly forth to pasture in the morning or loitered back at milking time, nor hardly has one stone slipped from another in the passing of the centuries. Yet they have been there a long time, those stones, the gray lichens have grown black on their sides and they long ago seem to have settled together with an air of finality A newly built stone wall does not look like this. It is an excrescence, an artificial boundary. These stone walls are nothing like that. They look as if the glacier had intended that they should rest there, a part of the rock-ribbed arrangement of the earth as it left it. So with all these gray stone walls that bound the farm and the road. They long ago lost the air of having been put in