ii 4 LITERARY PILGRIMAGES 



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 for- 

 tune 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 cen- 

 tury. 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 re- 

 mains. That stands just within the wall at the 



