e kind half so good, my table and
shelves are cracking with the weight of involuntary accessions to my
library.

This is the story as I remember it: Two children walk out, and are
questioned when they come home. One has found nothing to observe,
nothing to admire, nothing to describe, nothing to ask questions about.
The other has found everywhere objects of curiosity and interest. I
advise you, if you are a child anywhere under forty-five, and do not yet
wear glasses, to send at once for "Evenings at Home" and read that story.
For myself, I am always grateful to the writer of it for calling my
attention to common things. How many people have been waked to a quicker
consciousness of life by Wordsworth's simple lines about the daffodils,
and what he says of the thoughts suggested to him by "the meanest flower
that blows"!

I was driving with a friend, the other day, through a somewhat dreary
stretch of country, where there seemed to be very little to attract
notice or deserve remark. Still, the old spirit infused by "Eyes and No
Eyes" was upon me, and I looked for something to fasten my thought upon,
and treat as an artist treats a study for a picture. The first object to
which my eyes were drawn was an old-fashioned well-sweep. It did not take
much imaginative sensibility to be stirred by the sight of this most
useful, most ancient, most picturesque, of domestic conveniences. I know
something of the shadoof of Egypt,--the same arrangement by which the
sacred waters of the Nile have been lifted, from the days of the Pharaohs
to those of the Khedives. That long forefinger pointing to heaven was a
symbol which spoke to the Puritan exile as it spoke of old to the
enslaved Israelite. Was there ever any such water as that which we used
to draw from the deep, cold well, in "the old oaken bucket"? What
memories gather about the well in all ages! What love-matches have been
made at its margin, from the times of Jacob and, Rachel downward! What
fairy legends hover over it, what fearful mysteries has it hidden! The
beautiful well-sweep! It is too rarely that we see it, and as it dies
out and gives place to the odiously convenient pump, with the last patent
on its cast-iron uninterestingness, does it not seem as if the farmyard
aspect had lost half its attraction? So long as the dairy farm exists,
doubtless there must be every facility for getting water in abundance;
but the loss of the well-sweep cannot be made up to us even if ou