Page:Literary pilgrimages of a naturalist (IA literarypilgrima00packrich).pdf/165

 road, a stone's toss from the well, bearing on its topmost growth old-fashioned russets. But this tree was top-grafted some time in the early years of the last century. Before that it was of a now forgotten variety known to our great-grandfathers as "high top." Of late sprouts from below the graft on this old tree have come to maturity, and the visitor to the place may taste the same apples, with their sweet and pleasant flavor, that pleased the palate of the poet a century and more ago.

The old oaken bucket itself has passed and been replaced many a time since Woodworth's day; the wooden well-curb and the sweep, swinging in the upright crotch, have come and gone and come again. Curb and bucket and sweep are there today, similar in form and appearance no doubt and equally useful for the drawing of water, as near like those of which the poet wrote as is the water of to-day like that of his time. Even at the well itself the lapse of a century has left but one thing permanent. That is the cylinder of stone that walls it in. Here again, as in the walls surrounding the ancient fields, the stones that were the