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 present attenuation.

The well-sweep had served its turn, and my companion and I relapsed into silence.  After a while we passed another farmyard, with nothing which seemed deserving of remark except the wreck of an old wagon.

“Look,” I said, “if you want to see one of the greatest of all the triumphs of human ingenuity, one of the most beautiful, as it is one of the most useful, of all the mechanisms which the intelligence of successive ages has called into being.”

“I see nothing,” my companion answered, “but an old broken-down wagon.  Why they leave such a piece of lumbering trash about their place, where people can see it as they pass, is more than I can account for.”