From the general to the particular, from the past to the present. There still stands a cottage, off a by-road, mossy as a prostrate oaken tree, hedged with gooseberry-bushes and a clump of lilacs; and, better than all else, there is the well and its sweep. I could never learn when the cottage was built, but it was many a year ago, and its present occupants may have commenced housekeeping as far back in time, to judge from appearances. May they and the cottage last forever! Nowhere else can so much wood-lore and wise weather-saws be had at first hands. Nowhere else is there, at least for me, “the moss-covered bucket that hangs in the well.” There are many features of primitive country life that are fascinating, yet why they are so can not readily be explained. To linger by this open well is one of these, yet why even hours can be spent at such a spot one can not tell. Has it to do with a love of retrospection common to all past fifty?—let this go for an explanation, whether one or not. Stay! can it be that, after quaffing a gourdful of the sweet waters, I recall many an invitation to the cottage, and hope? Even yet I am as ready to respond when the old lady’s kindly face beams from the open door, for straightway there are visions of cakes and beer, the liking for which has never been even dulled. Ginger-cakes merely, but such ginger-cakes! Spicewood beer only, but what sparkle, what tingling spiciness! The very essence of the wild woods about the cottage, the brilliant glistening of the old well’s brightest drops, here are combined in a beady, golden draught that quickly inebriates—makes drunken with a love of old-time cottage days.