io8 LITERARY PILGRIMAGES 



, 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 final- 

 ity 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 



