d 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 our milk were diluted to twice its