Page:Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist (IA literarypilgrima00packrich).pdf/162

 the day or come with staff and scrip for but an afternoon.

It was about these, too, that "The Old Oaken Bucket" was written, though the words of the poem do not say so, nor, I fancy, did the author realize it. The water from the old well cooled the throat of his memory with these and sparkled with them to the eye of it as he recalled the dripping bucket. Without the background there were no picture, however we forget it in the vivid figures in the foreground. The background of Woodworth's picture remains much as he left it when, a boy in his teens, he started for Boston to make the fortune he was later to find in New York. Of the figures he painted in the immediate foreground, some remain vivid still, after the lapse of a century. It is not so with the orchard. The great trees that still bear good fruit that they toss over into the lane up by the old barn are vigorous in an old age that might well seem to go back and include the beginning of the nineteenth century, but it does not. The trees were planted since the poet's day. One tree only of the orchard he knew remains. That stands just within the wall at the