Next to the hickory nuts, we must rank the chestnuts. Some may give them
first place in the list of American nut trees. In England the chestnut
trees one hears about are never praised for their nuts. English boys and
girls do not eagerly plan for half-holidays spent in the jolly sport of
chestnutting. Their chestnut trees turn out to be very familiar to our
eyes. They are the horse chestnuts that we see so often at home. Their
nuts are handsome enough, and quite worth gathering for use in some
games, and just to have and to handle. But chestnutting! That is one of
the great joys of October in our country, a thing no boy or girl would
miss without bitter disappointment.
While the leaves turn yellow on the big trees, children and squirrels
have their eyes on the clustered, spiny balls at the ends of the
branches. “Not yet!” is the sign they read as plain as printed words.
Warm days come and go, and the tree holds out its sign, even after the
leaves begin to fall. Father and mother say: “Be patient!” But they do
not remember how hard that is. It is a long time since they were eight
and ten and twelve years old.
Then a cold night comes, and in the early morning a hoar frost is
disappearing as the sun rises. Four seams can be seen on some chestnut
burs, and the impatient boys throw clubs into the tree tops. But their
fingers are sore with trying to pry the burs open. The nuts are cheesy
and insipid.
“Just you wait a spell.” This is the advice of John, the raggedy man, who
does the chores. “You can’t hurry up chestnuts. When they’re ready, I’ll
take you where you can get a barrel of ’em, and not kill yourself, nor
ruin your hands gettin’ ’em.” He sees the rising tide of fear before it
is expressed in words, and answers mysteriously: “Nobody knows the place
but me. Let the little fellers an’ the town folks hunt for nuts under the
trees along the road. They’ll get a quart apiece, mebby, if they work
half a day. The place I’m goin’ to, you can scoop ’em up in handfuls.”
The trees far back from the high road are certainly more generous to the
few who find them than are the more accessible, and therefore more
popular trees. Nobody “scoops them up in handfuls,” literally, for there
are the burs, quite as prickly as before they split their four segments
apart, and let the two or three nuts fall out. Careful and quick motions
are needed to pick up the pointed nuts among the larger burs. But the
game is most absorbing. If the bags fill slowly, there is the consoling
thought that the shells are thin, and the nuts are almost solid meats.
The busy picker stops now and then to sample a few. They certainly are
riper and finer tasting than they were a short week ago.
Unopened or partly opened husks are often gathered. The nuts will ripen
and roll out on the attic floor, or on the roof of the side porch. Few
parties who go chestnutting content themselves with the loose nuts they
gather. The end of the day is a scramble to fill the bags or baskets with
hulls not yet fully open. Mittens faced with leather or made of canvas
are a good protection for the hands.
The saddest news from the woods of the Northeast is that a disease that
baffles the tree doctors has attacked and killed all the chestnut trees
in the neighbourhood of the city of New York, and it is marching steadily
westward. It has invaded New Jersey and Pennsylvania. A fungus attacking
the living layer under the bark of a tree is working where no remedy can
reach it. The tree loses vitality, but only when it is far gone does the
disease break through the bark, and show itself as small, yellow pimples
on the smooth bark of the branches. Out of these openings the spores
escape,—minute germs of the disease. The wind scatters them. So do birds,
insects, and squirrels. They lodge in cracks in the bark of other trees.
Only chestnut trees catch the disease, though the germs fall everywhere.
When it progresses far enough to produce a mat of fungus that encircles
the trunk, the tree is girdled, its food supply is cut off, and death
results.
The chinquapin is a Southern tree, which closely resembles the chestnut.
It is usually shrubby and dwarfed in all of its parts. The nuts are about
as large as our little hazel nuts, and each is alone in a spiny husk that
parts into halves when mature. Five or six of these little burs are often
borne on a single stalk.
In Arkansas the tree reaches medium size, but in the East it is familiar
as a scrubby tree that sends up suckers from the roots and forms
thickets, like hazel brush. Poor folks in the South have time to gather
these little nuts, which appear on market day in their season in some
cities and towns. They are sweet, and some people think they are better
than chestnuts.