Annals of our ancestors; one hundred and fifty years of history in the ...

52
ANNALS OF OUR ANCESTORS
land. We had a fine day for traveling; our magnificent train
swept through a rich country, miles of gardens with greenhouses,
among which I thought I recognized the great con-
servatories of James Vick's Sons.
As we proceeded on our way we watched with delight the
fair fields and orchards bending beneath their loads of apples.
I could but note with interest the long ricks of small stone
gathered in the far past from the stony fields that now lay
smooth and fruitful. These ricks had so long lain out of the
way of cultivator and reaper that earth had accumulated in
their interstices and blades of grass had sprung up there,
leaving long, grassy mounds as memorials of the pioneers'
children whose Httle hands had gathered those same stones
from the rough fields — hands long since passed from fields of
toil to mingle with "the clods of the valley." I remembered
with tender pain that our dear little mother's hands had, from
a field in New York, gathered just the same kind of stone to
get a place ready for planting on her father's farm, and that
in her childhood and early youth she too had a share in making
a beautiful and prosperous country fit to perpetuate the
memory of a good and industrious kindred.