We are accustomed to say in New England that few and fewer pigeons

visit us every year. Our forests furnish no mast for them. So, it

would seem, few and fewer thoughts visit each growing man from year to

year, for the grove in our minds is laid waste,--sold to feed

unnecessary fires of ambition, or sent to mill,--and there is scarcely

a twig left for them to perch on. They no longer build nor breed with

us. In some more genial season, perchance, a faint shadow flits across

the landscape of the mind, cast by the _wings_ of some thought in its

vernal or autumnal migration, but, looking up, we are unable to detect

the substance of the thought itself. Our winged thoughts are turned to

poultry. They no longer soar, and they attain only to a Shanghai and

Cochin-China grandeur. Those _gra-a-ate thoughts_, those _gra-a-ate

men_ you hear of!

* * * * *

We hug the earth,--how rarely we mount! Methinks we might elevate

ourselves a little more. We might climb a tree, at least. I found my

account in climbing a tree once. It was a tall white pine, on the top

of a hill; and though I got well pitched, I was well paid for it, for

I discovered new mountains in the horizon which I had never seen

before,--so much more of the earth and the heavens. I might have

walked about the foot of the tree for threescore years and ten, and

yet I certainly should never have seen them. But, above all, I

discovered around me,--it was near the end of June,--on the ends of

the topmost branches only, a few minute and delicate red cone-like

blossoms, the fertile flower of the white pine looking heavenward. I

carried straightway to the village the topmost spire, and showed it to

stranger jurymen who walked the streets,--for it was court week,--and

to farmers and lumber-dealers and woodchoppers and hunters, and not

one had ever seen the like before, but they wondered as at a star

dropped down. Tell of ancient architects finishing their works on the

tops of columns as perfectly as on the lower and more visible parts!

Nature has from the first expanded the minute blossoms of the forest

only toward the heavens, above men's heads and unobserved by them. We

see only the flowers that are under our feet in the meadows. The pines

have developed their delicate blossoms on the highest twigs of the

wood every summer for ages, as well over the heads of Nature's red

children as of her white ones; yet scarcely a farmer or hunter in the

land has ever seen them.

* * * * *

Above all, we cannot afford not to live in the present. He is blessed

over all mortals who loses no moment of the passing life in

remembering the past. Unless our philosophy hears the cock crow in

every barn-yard within our horizon, it is belated. That sound commonly

reminds us that we are growing rusty and antique in our employments

and habits of thought. His philosophy comes down to a more recent time

than ours. There is something suggested by it that is a newer

testament,--the gospel according to this moment. He has not fallen

astern; he has got up early and kept up early, and to be where he is

is to be in season, in the foremost rank of time. It is an expression

of the health and soundness of Nature, a brag for all the

world,--healthiness as of a spring burst forth, a new fountain of the

Muses, to celebrate this last instant of time. Where he lives no

fugitive slave laws are passed. Who has not betrayed his master many

times since last he heard that note?

The merit of this bird's strain is in its freedom from all

plaintiveness. The singer can easily move us to tears or to laughter,

but where is he who can excite in us a pure morning joy? When, in

doleful dumps, breaking the awful stillness of our wooden sidewalk on

a Sunday, or, perchance, a watcher in the house of mourning, I hear a

cockerel crow far or near, I think to myself, "There is one of us

well, at any rate,"--and with a sudden gush return to my senses.

* * * * *

We had a remarkable sunset one day last November. I was walking in a

meadow, the source of a small brook, when the sun at last, just before

setting, after a cold, gray day, reached a clear stratum in the

horizon, and the softest, brightest morning sunlight fell on the dry

grass and on the stems of the trees in the opposite horizon and on the

leaves of the shrub oaks on the hillside, while our shadows stretched

long over the meadow eastward, as if we were the only motes in its

beams. It was such a light as we could not have imagined a moment

before, and the air also was so warm and serene that nothing was

wanting to make a paradise of that meadow. When we reflected that this

was not a solitary phenomenon, never to happen again, but that it

would happen forever and ever, an infinite number of evenings, and

cheer and reassure the latest child that walked there, it was more

glorious still.

The sun sets on some retired meadow, where no house is visible, with

all the glory and splendor that it lavishes on cities, and perchance

as it has never set before,--where there is but a solitary marsh hawk

to have his wings gilded by it, or only a musquash looks out from his

cabin, and there is some little black-veined brook in the midst of the

marsh, just beginning to meander, winding slowly round a decaying

stump. We walked in so pure and bright a light, gilding the withered

grass and leaves, so softly and serenely bright, I thought I had never

bathed in such a golden flood, without a ripple or a murmur to it. The

west side of every wood and rising ground gleamed like the boundary of

Elysium, and the sun on our backs seemed like a gentle herdsman

driving us home at evening.

So we saunter toward the Holy Land, till one day the sun shall shine

more brightly than ever he has done, shall perchance shine into our

minds and hearts, and light up our whole lives with a great awakening

light, as warm and serene and golden as on a bankside in autumn.

AUTUMNAL TINTS

Europeans coming to America are surprised by the brilliancy of our

autumnal foliage. There is no account of such a phenomenon in English

poetry, because the trees acquire but few bright colors there. The

most that Thomson says on this subject in his "Autumn" is contained in

the lines,--

"But see the fading many-colored woods

Shade deepening over shade, the country round

Imbrown; a crowded umbrage, dusk and dun,

Of every hue, from wan declining green

To sooty dark;"

and in the line in which he speaks of

"Autumn beaming o'er the yellow woods."

The autumnal change of our woods has not made a deep impression on our

own literature yet. October has hardly tinged our poetry.

A great many, who have spent their lives in cities, and have never

chanced to come into the country at this season, have never seen this,

the flower, or rather the ripe fruit, of the year. I remember riding

with one such citizen, who, though a fortnight too late for the most

brilliant tints, was taken by surprise, and would not believe that

there had been any brighter. He had never heard of this phenomenon

before. Not only many in our towns have never witnessed it, but it is

scarcely remembered by the majority from year to year.

Most appear to confound changed leaves with withered ones, as if they

were to confound ripe apples with rotten ones. I think that the change

to some higher color in a leaf is an evidence that it has arrived at a

late and perfect maturity, answering to the maturity of fruits. It is

generally the lowest and oldest leaves which change first. But as the

perfect-winged and usually bright-colored insect is short-lived, so

the leaves ripen but to fall.

Generally, every fruit, on ripening, and just before it falls, when it

commences a more independent and individual existence, requiring less

nourishment from any source, and that not so much from the earth

through its stem as from the sun and air, acquires a bright tint. So

do leaves. The physiologist says it is "due to an increased absorption

of oxygen." That is the scientific account of the matter,--only a

reassertion of the fact. But I am more interested in the rosy cheek

than I am to know what particular diet the maiden fed on. The very

forest and herbage, the pellicle of the earth, must acquire a bright

color, an evidence of its ripeness,--as if the globe itself were a

fruit on its stem, with ever a cheek toward the sun.

Flowers are but colored leaves, fruits but ripe ones. The edible part

of most fruits is, as the physiologist says, "the parenchyma or fleshy

tissue of the leaf," of which they are formed.

Our appetites have commonly confined our views of ripeness and its

phenomena, color, mellowness, and perfectness, to the fruits which we

eat, and we are wont to forget that an immense harvest which we do not

eat, hardly use at all, is annually ripened by Nature. At our annual

cattle-shows and horticultural exhibitions, we make, as we think, a

great show of fair fruits, destined, however, to a rather ignoble end,

fruits not valued for their beauty chiefly. But round about and within

our towns there is annually another show of fruits, on an infinitely

grander scale, fruits which address our taste for beauty alone.

October is the month for painted leaves. Their rich glow now flashes

round the world. As fruits and leaves and the day itself acquire a

bright tint just before they fall, so the year near its setting.

October is its sunset sky; November the later twilight.

I formerly thought that it would be worth the while to get a specimen

leaf from each changing tree, shrub, and herbaceous plant, when it had

acquired its brightest characteristic color, in its transition from

the green to the brown state, outline it, and copy its color exactly,

with paint, in a book, which should be entitled "October, or Autumnal

Tints,"--beginning with the earliest reddening woodbine and the lake

of radical leaves, and coming down through the maples, hickories, and

sumachs, and many beautifully freckled leaves less generally known, to

the latest oaks and aspens. What a memento such a book would be! You

would need only to turn over its leaves to take a ramble through the

autumn woods whenever you pleased. Or if I could preserve the leaves

themselves, unfaded, it would be better still. I have made but little

progress toward such a book, but I have endeavored, instead, to

describe all these bright tints in the order in which they present

themselves. The following are some extracts from my notes.

THE PURPLE GRASSES

By the twentieth of August, everywhere in woods and swamps we are

reminded of the fall, both by the richly spotted sarsaparilla leaves

and brakes, and the withering and blackened skunk-cabbage and

hellebore, and, by the riverside, the already blackening pontederia.

The purple grass (_Eragrostis pectinacea_) is now in the height of its

beauty. I remember still when I first noticed this grass particularly.

Standing on a hillside near our river, I saw, thirty or forty rods

off, a stripe of purple half a dozen rods long, under the edge of a

wood, where the ground sloped toward a meadow. It was as high-colored

and interesting, though not quite so bright, as the patches of rhexia,

being a darker purple, like a berry's stain laid on close and thick.

On going to and examining it, I found it to be a kind of grass in

bloom, hardly a foot high, with but few green blades, and a fine

spreading panicle of purple flowers, a shallow, purplish mist

trembling around me. Close at hand it appeared but a dull purple, and

made little impression on the eye; it was even difficult to detect;

and if you plucked a single plant, you were surprised to find how thin

it was, and how little color it had. But viewed at a distance in a

favorable light, it was of a fine lively purple, flower-like,

enriching the earth. Such puny causes combine to produce these decided

effects. I was the more surprised and charmed because grass is

commonly of a sober and humble color.

With its beautiful purple blush it reminds me, and supplies the

place, of the rhexia, which is now leaving off, and it is one of the

most interesting phenomena of August. The finest patches of it grow on

waste strips or selvages of land at the base of dry hills, just above

the edge of the meadows, where the greedy mower does not deign to

swing his scythe; for this is a thin and poor grass, beneath his

notice. Or, it may be, because it is so beautiful he does not know

that it exists; for the same eye does not see this and timothy. He

carefully gets the meadow-hay and the more nutritious grasses which

grow next to that, but he leaves this fine purple mist for the

walker's harvest,--fodder for his fancy stock. Higher up the hill,

perchance, grow also blackberries, John's-wort, and neglected,

withered, and wiry June-grass. How fortunate that it grows in such

places, and not in the midst of the rank grasses which are annually

cut! Nature thus keeps use and beauty distinct. I know many such

localities, where it does not fail to present itself annually, and

paint the earth with its blush. It grows on the gentle slopes, either

in a continuous patch or in scattered and rounded tufts a foot in

diameter, and it lasts till it is killed by the first smart frosts.

In most plants the corolla or calyx is the part which attains the

highest color, and is the most attractive; in many it is the

seed-vessel or fruit; in others, as the red maple, the leaves; and in

others still it is the very culm itself which is the principal flower

or blooming part.

The last is especially the case with the poke or garget (_Phytolacca

decandra_). Some which stand under our cliffs quite dazzle me with

their purple stems now and early in September. They are as interesting

to me as most flowers, and one of the most important fruits of our

autumn. Every part is flower (or fruit), such is its superfluity of

color,--stem, branch, peduncle, pedicel, petiole, and even the at

length yellowish, purple-veined leaves. Its cylindrical racemes of

berries of various hues, from green to dark purple, six or seven

inches long, are gracefully drooping on all sides, offering repasts to

the birds; and even the sepals from which the birds have picked the

berries are a brilliant lake red, with crimson flame-like reflections,

equal to anything of the kind,--all on fire with ripeness. Hence the

_lacca_, from _lac_, lake. There are at the same time flower-buds,

flowers, green berries, dark-purple or ripe ones, and these

flower-like sepals, all on the same plant.

We love to see any redness in the vegetation of the temperate zone. It

is the color of colors. This plant speaks to our blood. It asks a

bright sun on it to make it show to best advantage, and it must be

seen at this season of the year. On warm hillsides its stems are ripe

by the twenty-third of August. At that date I walked through a

beautiful grove of them, six or seven feet high, on the side of one of

our cliffs, where they ripen early. Quite to the ground they were a

deep, brilliant purple, with a bloom contrasting with the still clear

green leaves. It appears a rare triumph of Nature to have produced and

perfected such a plant, as if this were enough for a summer. What a

perfect maturity it arrives at! It is the emblem of a successful life

concluded by a death not premature, which is an ornament to Nature.

What if we were to mature as perfectly, root and branch, glowing in

the midst of our decay, like the poke! I confess that it excites me to

behold them. I cut one for a cane, for I would fain handle and lean on

it. I love to press the berries between my fingers, and see their

juice staining my hand. To walk amid these upright, branching casks of

purple wine, which retain and diffuse a sunset glow, tasting each one

with your eye, instead of counting the pipes on a London dock, what a

privilege! For Nature's vintage is not confined to the vine. Our poets

have sung of wine, the product of a foreign plant which commonly they

never saw, as if our own plants had no juice in them more than the

singers. Indeed, this has been called by some the American grape, and,

though a native of America, its juices are used in some foreign

countries to improve the color of the wine; so that the poetaster may

be celebrating the virtues of the poke without knowing it. Here are

berries enough to paint afresh the western sky, and play the bacchanal

with, if you will. And what flutes its ensanguined stems would make,

to be used in such a dance! It is truly a royal plant. I could spend

the evening of the year musing amid the poke stems. And perchance amid

these groves might arise at last a new school of philosophy or poetry.

It lasts all through September.

At the same time with this, or near the end of August, a to me very

interesting genus of grasses, andropogons, or beard-grasses, is in its

prime: _Andropogon furcatus_, forked beard-grass, or call it

purple-fingered grass; _Andropogon scoparius_, purple wood-grass; and

_Andropogon_ (now called _Sorghum_) _nutans_, Indian-grass. The first

is a very tall and slender-culmed grass, three to seven feet high,

with four or five purple finger-like spikes raying upward from the

top. The second is also quite slender, growing in tufts two feet high

by one wide, with culms often somewhat curving, which, as the spikes

go out of bloom, have a whitish, fuzzy look. These two are prevailing

grasses at this season on dry and sandy fields and hillsides. The

culms of both, not to mention their pretty flowers, reflect a purple

tinge, and help to declare the ripeness of the year. Perhaps I have

the more sympathy with them because they are despised by the farmer,

and occupy sterile and neglected soil. They are high-colored, like

ripe grapes, and express a maturity which the spring did not suggest.

Only the August sun could have thus burnished these culms and leaves.

The farmer has long since done his upland haying, and he will not

condescend to bring his scythe to where these slender wild grasses

have at length flowered thinly; you often see spaces of bare sand amid

them. But I walk encouraged between the tufts of purple wood-grass

over the sandy fields, and along the edge of the shrub oaks, glad to

recognize these simple contemporaries. With thoughts cutting a broad

swathe I "get" them, with horse-raking thoughts I gather them into

windrows. The fine-eared poet may hear the whetting of my scythe.

These two were almost the first grasses that I learned to distinguish,

for I had not known by how many friends I was surrounded; I had seen

them simply as grasses standing. The purple of their culms also

excites me like that of the poke-weed stems.

Think what refuge there is for one, before August is over, from

college commencements and society that isolates! I can skulk amid the

tufts of purple wood-grass on the borders of the "Great Fields."

Wherever I walk these afternoons, the purple-fingered grass also

stands like a guide-board, and points my thoughts to more poetic paths

than they have lately traveled.

A man shall perhaps rush by and trample down plants as high as his

head, and cannot be said to know that they exist, though he may have

cut many tons of them, littered his stables with them, and fed them to

his cattle for years. Yet, if he ever favorably attends to them, he

may be overcome by their beauty. Each humblest plant, or weed, as we

call it, stands there to express some thought or mood of ours; and yet

how long it stands in vain! I had walked over those Great Fields so

many Augusts, and never yet distinctly recognized these purple

companions that I had there. I had brushed against them and trodden on

them, forsooth; and now, at last, they, as it were, rose up and

blessed me. Beauty and true wealth are always thus cheap and despised.

Heaven might be defined as the place which men avoid. Who can doubt

that these grasses, which the farmer says are of no account to him,

find some compensation in your appreciation of them? I may say that I

never saw them before; though, when I came to look them face to face,

there did come down to me a purple gleam from previous years; and now,

wherever I go, I see hardly anything else. It is the reign and

presidency of the andropogons.

Almost the very sands confess the ripening influence of the August

sun, and methinks, together with the slender grasses waving over them,

reflect a purple tinge. The impurpled sands! Such is the consequence

of all this sunshine absorbed into the pores of plants and of the

earth. All sap or blood is now wine-colored. At last we have not only

the purple sea, but the purple land.

The chestnut beard-grass, Indian-grass, or wood-grass, growing here

and there in waste places, but more rare than the former (from two to

four or five feet high), is still handsomer and of more vivid colors

than its congeners, and might well have caught the Indian's eye. It

has a long, narrow, one-sided, and slightly nodding panicle of bright

purple and yellow flowers, like a banner raised above its reedy

leaves. These bright standards are now advanced on the distant

hillsides, not in large armies, but in scattered troops or single

file, like the red men. They stand thus fair and bright,

representative of the race which they are named after, but for the

most part unobserved as they. The expression of this grass haunted me

for a week, after I first passed and noticed it, like the glance of an

eye. It stands like an Indian chief taking a last look at his favorite

hunting-grounds.

THE RED MAPLE

By the twenty-fifth of September, the red maples generally are

beginning to be ripe. Some large ones have been conspicuously changing

for a week, and some single trees are now very brilliant. I notice a

small one, half a mile off across a meadow, against the green woodside

there, a far brighter red than the blossoms of any tree in summer,

and more conspicuous. I have observed this tree for several autumns

invariably changing earlier than its fellows, just as one tree ripens

its fruit earlier than another. It might serve to mark the season,

perhaps. I should be sorry if it were cut down. I know of two or three

such trees in different parts of our town, which might, perhaps, be

propagated from, as early ripeners or September trees, and their seed

be advertised in the market, as well as that of radishes, if we cared

as much about them.

At present these burning bushes stand chiefly along the edge of the

meadows, or I distinguish them afar on the hillsides here and there.

Sometimes you will see many small ones in a swamp turned quite crimson

when all other trees around are still perfectly green, and the former

appear so much the brighter for it. They take you by surprise, as you

are going by on one side, across the fields, thus early in the season,

as if it were some gay encampment of the red men, or other foresters,

of whose arrival you had not heard.

Some single trees, wholly bright scarlet, seen against others of their

kind still freshly green, or against evergreens, are more memorable

than whole groves will be by and by. How beautiful, when a whole tree

is like one great scarlet fruit full of ripe juices, every leaf, from

lowest limb to topmost spire, all aglow, especially if you look toward

the sun! What more remarkable object can there be in the landscape?

Visible for miles, too fair to be believed. If such a phenomenon

occurred but once, it would be handed down by tradition to posterity,

and get into the mythology at last.

The whole tree thus ripening in advance of its fellows attains a

singular preëminence, and sometimes maintains it for a week or two. I

am thrilled at the sight of it, bearing aloft its scarlet standard for

the regiment of green-clad foresters around, and I go half a mile out

of my way to examine it. A single tree becomes thus the crowning

beauty of some meadowy vale, and the expression of the whole

surrounding forest is at once more spirited for it.

A small red maple has grown, perchance, far away at the head of some

retired valley, a mile from any road, unobserved. It has faithfully

discharged the duties of a maple there, all winter and summer,

neglected none of its economies, but added to its stature in the

virtue which belongs to a maple, by a steady growth for so many

months, never having gone gadding abroad, and is nearer heaven than it

was in the spring. It has faithfully husbanded its sap, and afforded a

shelter to the wandering bird, has long since ripened its seeds and

committed them to the winds, and has the satisfaction of knowing,

perhaps, that a thousand little well-behaved maples are already

settled in life somewhere. It deserves well of Mapledom. Its leaves

have been asking it from time to time, in a whisper, "When shall we

redden?" And now, in this month of September, this month of traveling,

when men are hastening to the seaside, or the mountains, or the lakes,

this modest maple, still without budging an inch, travels in its

reputation,--runs up its scarlet flag on that hillside, which shows

that it has finished its summer's work before all other trees, and

withdraws from the contest. At the eleventh hour of the year, the

tree which no scrutiny could have detected here when it was most

industrious is thus, by the tint of its maturity, by its very blushes,

revealed at last to the careless and distant traveler, and leads his

thoughts away from the dusty road into those brave solitudes which it

inhabits. It flashes out conspicuous with all the virtue and beauty of

a maple,--_Acer rubrum_. We may now read its title, or _rubric_,

clear. Its _virtues_, not its sins, are as scarlet.

Notwithstanding the red maple is the most intense scarlet of any of

our trees, the sugar maple has been the most celebrated, and Michaux

in his "Sylva" does not speak of the autumnal color of the former.

About the second of October, these trees, both large and small, are

most brilliant, though many are still green. In "sprout-lands" they

seem to vie with one another, and ever some particular one in the

midst of the crowd will be of a peculiarly pure scarlet, and by its

more intense color attract our eye even at a distance, and carry off

the palm. A large red maple swamp, when at the height of its change,

is the most obviously brilliant of all tangible things, where I dwell,

so abundant is this tree with us. It varies much both in form and

color. A great many are merely yellow; more, scarlet; others, scarlet

deepening into crimson, more red than common. Look at yonder swamp of

maples mixed with pines, at the base of a pine-clad hill, a quarter of

a mile off, so that you get the full effect of the bright colors,

without detecting the imperfections of the leaves, and see their

yellow, scarlet, and crimson fires, of all tints, mingled and

contrasted with the green. Some maples are yet green, only yellow or

crimson-tipped on the edges of their flakes, like the edges of a

hazelnut bur; some are wholly brilliant scarlet, raying out regularly

and finely every way, bilaterally, like the veins of a leaf; others,

of more irregular form, when I turn my head slightly, emptying out

some of its earthiness and concealing the trunk of the tree, seem to

rest heavily flake on flake, like yellow and scarlet clouds, wreath

upon wreath, or like snow-drifts driving through the air, stratified

by the wind. It adds greatly to the beauty of such a swamp at this

season, that, even though there may be no other trees interspersed, it

is not seen as a simple mass of color, but, different trees being of

different colors and hues, the outline of each crescent treetop is

distinct, and where one laps on to another. Yet a painter would hardly

venture to make them thus distinct a quarter of a mile off.

As I go across a meadow directly toward a low rising ground this

bright afternoon, I see, some fifty rods off toward the sun, the top

of a maple swamp just appearing over the sheeny russet edge of the

hill, a stripe apparently twenty rods long by ten feet deep, of the

most intensely brilliant scarlet, orange, and yellow, equal to any

flowers or fruits, or any tints ever painted. As I advance, lowering

the edge of the hill which makes the firm foreground or lower frame of

the picture, the depth of the brilliant grove revealed steadily

increases, suggesting that the whole of the inclosed valley is filled

with such color. One wonders that the tithing-men and fathers of the

town are not out to see what the trees mean by their high colors and

exuberance of spirits, fearing that some mischief is brewing. I do not

see what the Puritans did at this season, when the maples blaze out in

scarlet. They certainly could not have worshiped in groves then.

Perhaps that is what they built meeting-houses and fenced them round

with horse-sheds for.

THE ELM

Now too, the first of October, or later, the elms are at the height of

their autumnal beauty,--great brownish-yellow masses, warm from their

September oven, hanging over the highway. Their leaves are perfectly

ripe. I wonder if there is any answering ripeness in the lives of the

men who live beneath them. As I look down our street, which is lined

with them, they remind me both by their form and color of yellowing

sheaves of grain, as if the harvest had indeed come to the village

itself, and we might expect to find some maturity and _flavor_ in the

thoughts of the villagers at last. Under those bright rustling yellow

piles just ready to fall on the heads of the walkers, how can any

crudity or greenness of thought or act prevail? When I stand where

half a dozen large elms droop over a house, it is as if I stood within

a ripe pumpkin-rind, and I feel as mellow as if I were the pulp,

though I may be somewhat stringy and seedy withal. What is the late

greenness of the English elm, like a cucumber out of season, which

does not know when to have done, compared with the early and golden

maturity of the American tree? The street is the scene of a great

harvest-home. It would be worth the while to set out these trees, if

only for their autumnal value. Think of these great yellow canopies

or parasols held over our heads and houses by the mile together,

making the village all one and compact,--an _ulmarium_, which is at

the same time a nursery of men! And then how gently and unobserved

they drop their burden and let in the sun when it is wanted, their

leaves not heard when they fall on our roofs and in our streets; and

thus the village parasol is shut up and put away! I see the market-man

driving into the village, and disappearing under its canopy of

elm-tops, with _his_ crop, as into a great granary or barn-yard. I am

tempted to go thither as to a husking of thoughts, now dry and ripe,

and ready to be separated from their integuments; but, alas! I foresee

that it will be chiefly husks and little thought, blasted pig-corn,

fit only for cob-meal,--for, as you sow, so shall you reap.

FALLEN LEAVES

By the sixth of October the leaves generally begin to fall, in

successive showers, after frost or rain; but the principal

leaf-harvest, the acme of the _Fall_, is commonly about the sixteenth.

Some morning at that date there is perhaps a harder frost than we have

seen, and ice formed under the pump, and now, when the morning wind

rises, the leaves come down in denser showers than ever. They suddenly

form thick beds or carpets on the ground, in this gentle air, or even

without wind, just the size and form of the tree above. Some trees, as

small hickories, appear to have dropped their leaves instantaneously,

as a soldier grounds arms at a signal; and those of the hickory,

being bright yellow still, though withered, reflect a blaze of light

from the ground where they lie. Down they have come on all sides, at

the first earnest touch of autumn's wand, making a sound like rain.

Or else it is after moist and rainy weather that we notice how great a

fall of leaves there has been in the night, though it may not yet be

the touch that loosens the rock maple leaf. The streets are thickly

strewn with the trophies, and fallen elm leaves make a dark brown

pavement under our feet. After some remarkably warm Indian-summer day

or days, I perceive that it is the unusual heat which, more than

anything, causes the leaves to fall, there having been, perhaps, no

frost nor rain for some time. The intense heat suddenly ripens and

wilts them, just as it softens and ripens peaches and other fruits,

and causes them to drop.

The leaves of late red maples, still bright, strew the earth, often

crimson-spotted on a yellow ground, like some wild apples,--though

they preserve these bright colors on the ground but a day or two,

especially if it rains. On causeways I go by trees here and there all

bare and smoke-like, having lost their brilliant clothing; but there

it lies, nearly as bright as ever, on the ground on one side, and

making nearly as regular a figure as lately on the tree. I would

rather say that I first observe the trees thus flat on the ground like

a permanent colored shadow, and they suggest to look for the boughs

that bore them. A queen might be proud to walk where these gallant

trees have spread their bright cloaks in the mud. I see wagons roll

over them as a shadow or a reflection, and the drivers heed them just

as little as they did their shadows before.

Birds' nests, in the huckleberry and other shrubs, and in trees, are

already being filled with the withered leaves. So many have fallen in

the woods that a squirrel cannot run after a falling nut without being

heard. Boys are raking them in the streets, if only for the pleasure

of dealing with such clean, crisp substances. Some sweep the paths

scrupulously neat, and then stand to see the next breath strew them

with new trophies. The swamp floor is thickly covered, and the

_Lycopodium lucidulum_ looks suddenly greener amid them. In dense

woods they half cover pools that are three or four rods long. The

other day I could hardly find a well-known spring, and even suspected

that it had dried up, for it was completely concealed by freshly

fallen leaves; and when I swept them aside and revealed it, it was

like striking the earth, with Aaron's rod, for a new spring. Wet

grounds about the edges of swamps look dry with them. At one swamp,

where I was surveying, thinking to step on a leafy shore from a rail,

I got into the water more than a foot deep.

When I go to the river the day after the principal fall of leaves, the

sixteenth, I find my boat all covered, bottom and seats, with the

leaves of the golden willow under which it is moored, and I set sail

with a cargo of them rustling under my feet. If I empty it, it will be

full again to-morrow. I do not regard them as litter, to be swept out,

but accept them as suitable straw or matting for the bottom of my

carriage. When I turn up into the mouth of the Assabet, which is

wooded, large fleets of leaves are floating on its surface, as it

were getting out to sea, with room to tack; but next the shore, a

little farther up, they are thicker than foam, quite concealing the

water for a rod in width, under and amid the alders, button-bushes,

and maples, still perfectly light and dry, with fibre unrelaxed; and

at a rocky bend where they are met and stopped by the morning wind,

they sometimes form a broad and dense crescent quite across the river.

When I turn my prow that way, and the wave which it makes strikes

them, list what a pleasant rustling from these dry substances getting

on one another! Often it is their undulation only which reveals the

water beneath them. Also every motion of the wood turtle on the shore

is betrayed by their rustling there. Or even in mid-channel, when the

wind rises, I hear them blown with a rustling sound. Higher up they

are slowly moving round and round in some great eddy which the river

makes, as that at the "Leaning Hemlocks," where the water is deep, and

the current is wearing into the bank.

Perchance, in the afternoon of such a day, when the water is perfectly

calm and full of reflections, I paddle gently down the main stream,

and, turning up the Assabet, reach a quiet cove, where I unexpectedly

find myself surrounded by myriads of leaves, like fellow-voyagers,

which seem to have the same purpose, or want of purpose, with myself.

See this great fleet of scattered leaf-boats which we paddle amid, in

this smooth river-bay, each one curled up on every side by the sun's

skill, each nerve a stiff spruce knee,--like boats of hide, and of all

patterns,--Charon's boat probably among the rest,--and some with

lofty prows and poops, like the stately vessels of the ancients,

scarcely moving in the sluggish current,--like the great fleets, the

dense Chinese cities of boats, with which you mingle on entering some

great mart, some New York or Canton, which we are all steadily

approaching together. How gently each has been deposited on the water!

No violence has been used towards them yet, though, perchance,

palpitating hearts were present at the launching. And painted ducks,

too, the splendid wood duck among the rest, often come to sail and

float amid the painted leaves,--barks of a nobler model still!

What wholesome herb drinks are to be had in the swamps now! What

strong medicinal but rich scents from the decaying leaves! The rain

falling on the freshly dried herbs and leaves, and filling the pools

and ditches into which they have dropped thus clean and rigid, will

soon convert them into tea,--green, black, brown, and yellow teas, of

all degrees of strength, enough to set all Nature a-gossiping. Whether

we drink them or not, as yet, before their strength is drawn, these

leaves, dried on great Nature's coppers, are of such various pure and

delicate tints as might make the fame of Oriental teas.

How they are mixed up, of all species, oak and maple and chestnut and

birch! But Nature is not cluttered with them; she is a perfect

husbandman; she stores them all. Consider what a vast crop is thus

annually shed on the earth! This, more than any mere grain or seed, is

the great harvest of the year. The trees are now repaying the earth

with interest what they have taken from it. They are discounting.

They are about to add a leaf's thickness to the depth of the soil.

This is the beautiful way in which Nature gets her muck, while I

chaffer with this man and that, who talks to me about sulphur and the

cost of carting. We are all the richer for their decay. I am more

interested in this crop than in the English grass alone or in the

corn. It prepares the virgin mould for future corn-fields and forests,

on which the earth fattens. It keeps our homestead in good heart.

For beautiful variety no crop can be compared with this. Here is not

merely the plain yellow of the grains, but nearly all the colors that

we know, the brightest blue not excepted: the early blushing maple,

the poison sumach blazing its sins as scarlet, the mulberry ash, the

rich chrome yellow of the poplars, the brilliant red huckleberry, with

which the hills' backs are painted, like those of sheep. The frost

touches them, and, with the slightest breath of returning day or

jarring of earth's axle, see in what showers they come floating down!

The ground is all parti-colored with them. But they still live in the

soil, whose fertility and bulk they increase, and in the forests that

spring from it. They stoop to rise, to mount higher in coming years,

by subtle chemistry, climbing by the sap in the trees; and the

sapling's first fruits thus shed, transmuted at last, may adorn its

crown, when, in after years, it has become the monarch of the forest.

It is pleasant to walk over the beds of these fresh, crisp, and

rustling leaves. How beautifully they go to their graves! how gently

lay themselves down and turn to mould!--painted of a thousand hues,

and fit to make the beds of us living. So they troop to their last

resting-place, light and frisky. They put on no weeds, but merrily

they go scampering over the earth, selecting the spot, choosing a lot,

ordering no iron fence, whispering all through the woods about

it,--some choosing the spot where the bodies of men are mouldering

beneath, and meeting them half-way. How many flutterings before they

rest quietly in their graves! They that soared so loftily, how

contentedly they return to dust again, and are laid low, resigned to

lie and decay at the foot of the tree, and afford nourishment to new

generations of their kind, as well as to flutter on high! They teach

us how to die. One wonders if the time will ever come when men, with

their boasted faith in immortality, will lie down as gracefully and as

ripe,--with such an Indian-summer serenity will shed their bodies, as

they do their hair and nails.

When the leaves fall, the whole earth is a cemetery pleasant to walk

in. I love to wander and muse over them in their graves. Here are no

lying nor vain epitaphs. What though you own no lot at Mount Auburn?

Your lot is surely cast somewhere in this vast cemetery, which has

been consecrated from of old. You need attend no auction to secure a

place. There is room enough here. The loosestrife shall bloom and the

huckleberry-bird sing over your bones. The woodman and hunter shall be

your sextons, and the children shall tread upon the borders as much as

they will. Let us walk in the cemetery of the leaves; this is your

true Greenwood Cemetery.

[Illustration: _Fallen Leaves_]

THE SUGAR MAPLE

But think not that the splendor of the year is over; for as one leaf

does not make a summer, neither does one falling leaf make an autumn.

The smallest sugar maples in our streets make a great show as early as

the fifth of October, more than any other trees there. As I look up

the main street, they appear like painted screens standing before the

houses; yet many are green. But now, or generally by the seventeenth

of October, when almost all red maples and some white maples are bare,

the large sugar maples also are in their glory, glowing with yellow

and red, and show unexpectedly bright and delicate tints. They are

remarkable for the contrast they often afford of deep blushing red on

one half and green on the other. They become at length dense masses of

rich yellow with a deep scarlet blush, or more than blush, on the

exposed surfaces. They are the brightest trees now in the street.

The large ones on our Common are particularly beautiful. A delicate

but warmer than golden yellow is now the prevailing color, with

scarlet cheeks. Yet, standing on the east side of the Common just

before sundown, when the western light is transmitted through them, I

see that their yellow even, compared with the pale lemon yellow of an

elm close by, amounts to a scarlet, without noticing the bright

scarlet portions. Generally, they are great regular oval masses of

yellow and scarlet. All the sunny warmth of the season, the Indian

summer, seems to be absorbed in their leaves. The lowest and inmost

leaves next the bole are, as usual, of the most delicate yellow and

green, like the complexion of young men brought up in the house. There

is an auction on the Common to-day, but its red flag is hard to be

discerned amid this blaze of color.

Little did the fathers of the town anticipate this brilliant success,

when they caused to be imported from farther in the country some

straight poles with their tops cut off, which they called sugar

maples; and, as I remember, after they were set out, a neighboring

merchant's clerk, by way of jest, planted beans about them. Those

which were then jestingly called bean-poles are to-day far the most

beautiful objects noticeable in our streets. They are worth all and

more than they have cost,--though one of the selectmen, while setting

them out, took the cold which occasioned his death,--if only because

they have filled the open eyes of children with their rich color

unstintedly so many Octobers. We will not ask them to yield us sugar

in the spring, while they afford us so fair a prospect in the autumn.

Wealth indoors may be the inheritance of few, but it is equally

distributed on the Common. All children alike can revel in this golden

harvest.

Surely trees should be set in our streets with a view to their October

splendor, though I doubt whether this is ever considered by the "Tree

Society." Do you not think it will make some odds to these children

that they were brought up under the maples? Hundreds of eyes are

steadily drinking in this color, and by these teachers even the

truants are caught and educated the moment they step abroad. Indeed,

neither the truant nor the studious is at present taught color in the

schools. These are instead of the bright colors in apothecaries'

shops and city windows. It is a pity that we have no more _red_

maples, and some hickories, in our streets as well. Our paint-box is

very imperfectly filled. Instead of, or beside, supplying such

paint-boxes as we do, we might supply these natural colors to the

young. Where else will they study color under greater advantages? What

School of Design can vie with this? Think how much the eyes of

painters of all kinds, and of manufacturers of cloth and paper, and

paper-stainers, and countless others, are to be educated by these

autumnal colors. The stationer's envelopes may be of very various

tints, yet not so various as those of the leaves of a single tree. If

you want a different shade or tint of a particular color, you have

only to look farther within or without the tree or the wood. These

leaves are not many dipped in one dye, as at the dye-house, but they

are dyed in light of infinitely various degrees of strength and left

to set and dry there.

Shall the names of so many of our colors continue to be derived from

those of obscure foreign localities, as Naples yellow, Prussian blue,

raw Sienna, burnt Umber, Gamboge? (surely the Tyrian purple must have

faded by this time), or from comparatively trivial articles of

commerce,--chocolate, lemon, coffee, cinnamon, claret? (shall we

compare our hickory to a lemon, or a lemon to a hickory?) or from ores

and oxides which few ever see? Shall we so often, when describing to

our neighbors the color of something we have seen, refer them, not to

some natural object in our neighborhood, but perchance to a bit of

earth fetched from the other side of the planet, which possibly they

may find at the apothecary's, but which probably neither they nor we

ever saw? Have we not an _earth_ under our feet,--aye, and a sky over

our heads? Or is the last _all_ ultramarine? What do we know of

sapphire, amethyst, emerald, ruby, amber, and the like,--most of us

who take these names in vain? Leave these precious words to

cabinet-keepers, virtuosos, and maids-of-honor,--to the Nabobs,

Begums, and Chobdars of Hindostan, or wherever else. I do not see why,

since America and her autumn woods have been discovered, our leaves

should not compete with the precious stones in giving names to colors;

and, indeed, I believe that in course of time the names of some of our

trees and shrubs, as well as flowers, will get into our popular

chromatic nomenclature.

But of much more importance than a knowledge of the names and

distinctions of color is the joy and exhilaration which these colored

leaves excite. Already these brilliant trees throughout the street,

without any more variety, are at least equal to an annual festival and

holiday, or a week of such. These are cheap and innocent gala-days,

celebrated by one and all without the aid of committees or marshals,

such a show as may safely be licensed, not attracting gamblers or

rum-sellers, not requiring any special police to keep the peace. And

poor indeed must be that New England village's October which has not

the maple in its streets. This October festival costs no powder, nor

ringing of bells, but every tree is a living liberty-pole on which a

thousand bright flags are waving.

No wonder that we must have our annual cattle-show, and fall training,

and perhaps cornwallis, our September courts, and the like. Nature

herself holds her annual fair in October, not only in the streets, but

in every hollow and on every hillside. When lately we looked into that

red maple swamp all ablaze, where the trees were clothed in their

vestures of most dazzling tints, did it not suggest a thousand gypsies

beneath,--a race capable of wild delight,--or even the fabled fauns,

satyrs, and wood-nymphs come back to earth? Or was it only a

congregation of wearied woodchoppers, or of proprietors come to

inspect their lots, that we thought of? Or, earlier still, when we

paddled on the river through that fine-grained September air, did

there not appear to be something new going on under the sparkling

surface of the stream, a shaking of props, at least, so that we made

haste in order to be up in time? Did not the rows of yellowing willows

and button-bushes on each side seem like rows of booths, under which,

perhaps, some fluviatile egg-pop equally yellow was effervescing? Did

not all these suggest that man's spirits should rise as high as

Nature's,--should hang out their flag, and the routine of his life be

interrupted by an analogous expression of joy and hilarity?

No annual training or muster of soldiery, no celebration with its

scarfs and banners, could import into the town a hundredth part of the

annual splendor of our October. We have only to set the trees, or let

them stand, and Nature will find the colored drapery,--flags of all

her nations, some of whose private signals hardly the botanist can

read,--while we walk under the triumphal arches of the elms. Leave it

to Nature to appoint the days, whether the same as in neighboring

States or not, and let the clergy read her proclamations, if they can

understand them. Behold what a brilliant drapery is her woodbine flag!

What public-spirited merchant, think you, has contributed this part of

the show? There is no handsomer shingling and paint than this vine, at

present covering a whole side of some houses. I do not believe that

the ivy _never sere_ is comparable to it. No wonder it has been

extensively introduced into London. Let us have a good many maples and

hickories and scarlet oaks, then, I say. Blaze away! Shall that dirty

roll of bunting in the gun-house be all the colors a village can

display? A village is not complete, unless it have these trees to mark

the season in it. They are important, like the town clock. A village

that has them not will not be found to work well. It has a screw

loose, an essential part is wanting. Let us have willows for spring,

elms for summer, maples and walnuts and tupeloes for autumn,

evergreens for winter, and oaks for all seasons. What is a gallery in

a house to a gallery in the streets, which every market-man rides

through, whether he will or not? Of course, there is not a

picture-gallery in the country which would be worth so much to us as

is the western view at sunset under the elms of our main street. They

are the frame to a picture which is daily painted behind them. An

avenue of elms as large as our largest and three miles long would seem

to lead to some admirable place, though only C---- were at the end of

it.

A village needs these innocent stimulants of bright and cheering

prospects to keep off melancholy and superstition. Show me two

villages, one embowered in trees and blazing with all the glories of

October, the other a merely trivial and treeless waste, or with only a

single tree or two for suicides, and I shall be sure that in the

latter will be found the most starved and bigoted religionists and the

most desperate drinkers. Every wash-tub and milk-can and gravestone

will be exposed. The inhabitants will disappear abruptly behind their

barns and houses, like desert Arabs amid their rocks, and I shall look

to see spears in their hands. They will be ready to accept the most

barren and forlorn doctrine,--as that the world is speedily coming to

an end, or has already got to it, or that they themselves are turned

wrong side outward. They will perchance crack their dry joints at one

another and call it a spiritual communication.

But to confine ourselves to the maples. What if we were to take half

as much pains in protecting them as we do in setting them out,--not

stupidly tie our horses to our dahlia stems?

What meant the fathers by establishing this _perfectly living_

institution before the church,--this institution which needs no

repairing nor repainting, which is continually enlarged and repaired

by its growth? Surely they

"Wrought in a sad sincerity;

Themselves from God they could not free;

They _planted_ better than they knew;--

The conscious _trees_ to beauty grew."

Verily these maples are cheap preachers, permanently settled, which

preach their half-century, and century, aye, and century-and-a-half

sermons, with constantly increasing unction and influence, ministering

to many generations of men; and the least we can do is to supply them

with suitable colleagues as they grow infirm.

THE SCARLET OAK

Belonging to a genus which is remarkable for the beautiful form of its

leaves, I suspect that some scarlet oak leaves surpass those of all

other oaks in the rich and wild beauty of their outlines. I judge from

an acquaintance with twelve species, and from drawings which I have

seen of many others.

Stand under this tree and see how finely its leaves are cut against

the sky,--as it were, only a few sharp points extending from a midrib.

They look like double, treble, or quadruple crosses. They are far more

ethereal than the less deeply scalloped oak leaves. They have so

little leafy _terra firma_ that they appear melting away in the light,

and scarcely obstruct our view. The leaves of very young plants are,

like those of full-grown oaks of other species, more entire, simple,

and lumpish in their outlines, but these, raised high on old trees,

have solved the leafy problem. Lifted higher and higher, and

sublimated more and more, putting off some earthiness and cultivating

more intimacy with the light each year, they have at length the least

possible amount of earthy matter, and the greatest spread and grasp of

skyey influences. There they dance, arm in arm with the

light,--tripping it on fantastic points, fit partners in those aerial

halls. So intimately mingled are they with it, that, what with their

slenderness and their glossy surfaces, you can hardly tell at last

what in the dance is leaf and what is light. And when no zephyr stirs,

they are at most but a rich tracery to the forest windows.

I am again struck with their beauty, when, a month later, they thickly

strew the ground in the woods, piled one upon another under my feet.

They are then brown above, but purple beneath. With their narrow lobes

and their bold, deep scallops reaching almost to the middle, they

suggest that the material must be cheap, or else there has been a

lavish expense in their creation, as if so much had been cut out. Or

else they seem to us the remnants of the stuff out of which leaves

have been cut with a die. Indeed, when they lie thus one upon another,

they remind me of a pile of scrap-tin.

Or bring one home, and study it closely at your leisure, by the

fireside. It is a type, not from any Oxford font, not in the Basque

nor the arrow-headed character, not found on the Rosetta Stone, but

destined to be copied in sculpture one day, if they ever get to

whittling stone here. What a wild and pleasing outline, a combination

of graceful curves and angles! The eye rests with equal delight on

what is not leaf and on what is leaf,--on the broad, free, open

sinuses, and on the long, sharp, bristle-pointed lobes. A simple oval

outline would include it all, if you connected the points of the leaf;

but how much richer is it than that, with its half-dozen deep

scallops, in which the eye and thought of the beholder are embayed! If

I were a drawing-master, I would set my pupils to copying these

leaves, that they might learn to draw firmly and gracefully.

Regarded as water, it is like a pond with half a dozen broad rounded

promontories extending nearly to its middle, half from each side,

while its watery bays extend far inland, like sharp friths, at each of

whose heads several fine streams empty in,--almost a leafy

archipelago.

But it oftener suggests land, and, as Dionysius and Pliny compared the

form of the Morea to that of the leaf of the Oriental plane tree, so

this leaf reminds me of some fair wild island in the ocean, whose

extensive coast, alternate rounded bays with smooth strands, and

sharp-pointed rocky capes, mark it as fitted for the habitation of

man, and destined to become a centre of civilization at last. To the

sailor's eye, it is a much indented shore. Is it not, in fact, a shore

to the aerial ocean, on which the windy surf beats? At sight of this

leaf we are all mariners,--if not vikings, buccaneers, and

filibusters. Both our love of repose and our spirit of adventure are

addressed. In our most casual glance, perchance, we think that if we

succeed in doubling those sharp capes we shall find deep, smooth, and

secure havens in the ample bays. How different from the white oak

leaf, with its rounded headlands, on which no lighthouse need be

placed! That is an England, with its long civil history, that may be

read. This is some still unsettled New-found Island or Celebes. Shall

we go and be rajahs there?

By the twenty-sixth of October the large scarlet oaks are in their

prime, when other oaks are usually withered. They have been kindling

their fires for a week past, and now generally burst into a blaze.

This alone of _our_ indigenous deciduous trees (excepting the

dogwood, of which I do not know half a dozen, and they are but large

bushes) is now in its glory. The two aspens and the sugar maple come

nearest to it in date, but they have lost the greater part of their

leaves. Of evergreens, only the pitch pine is still commonly bright.

But it requires a particular alertness, if not devotion to these

phenomena, to appreciate the wide-spread, but late and unexpected

glory of the scarlet oaks. I do not speak here of the small trees and

shrubs, which are commonly observed, and which are now withered, but

of the large trees. Most go in and shut their doors, thinking that

bleak and colorless November has already come, when some of the most

brilliant and memorable colors are not yet lit.

This very perfect and vigorous one, about forty feet high, standing in

an open pasture, which was quite glossy green on the twelfth, is now,

the twenty-sixth, completely changed to bright dark-scarlet,--every

leaf, between you and the sun, as if it had been dipped into a scarlet

dye. The whole tree is much like a heart in form, as well as color.

Was not this worth waiting for? Little did you think, ten days ago,

that that cold green tree would assume such color as this. Its leaves

are still firmly attached, while those of other trees are falling

around it. It seems to say: "I am the last to blush, but I blush

deeper than any of ye. I bring up the rear in my red coat. We scarlet

ones, alone of oaks, have not given up the fight."

The sap is now, and even far into November, frequently flowing fast in

these trees, as in maples in the spring; and apparently their bright

tints, now that most other oaks are withered, are connected with this

phenomenon. They are full of life. It has a pleasantly astringent,

acorn-like taste, this strong oak wine, as I find on tapping them with

my knife.

Looking across this woodland valley, a quarter of a mile wide, how

rich those scarlet oaks embosomed in pines, their bright red branches

intimately intermingled with them! They have their full effect there.

The pine boughs are the green calyx to their red petals. Or, as we go

along a road in the woods, the sun striking endwise through it, and

lighting up the red tents of the oaks, which on each side are mingled

with the liquid green of the pines, makes a very gorgeous scene.

Indeed, without the evergreens for contrast, the autumnal tints would

lose much of their effect.

The scarlet oak asks a clear sky and the brightness of late October

days. These bring out its colors. If the sun goes into a cloud they

become comparatively indistinct. As I sit on a cliff in the southwest

part of our town, the sun is now getting low, and the woods in

Lincoln, south and east of me, are lit up by its more level rays; and

in the scarlet oaks, scattered so equally over the forest, there is

brought out a more brilliant redness than I had believed was in them.

Every tree of this species which is visible in those directions, even

to the horizon, now stands out distinctly red. Some great ones lift

their red backs high above the woods, in the next town, like huge

roses with a myriad of fine petals; and some more slender ones, in a

small grove of white pines on Pine Hill in the east, on the very verge

of the horizon, alternating with the pines on the edge of the grove,

and shouldering them with their red coats, look like soldiers in red

amid hunters in green. This time it is Lincoln green, too. Till the

sun got low, I did not believe that there were so many redcoats in the

forest army. Theirs is an intense, burning red, which would lose some

of its strength, methinks, with every step you might take toward them;

for the shade that lurks amid their foliage does not report itself at

this distance, and they are unanimously red. The focus of their

reflected color is in the atmosphere far on this side. Every such tree

becomes a nucleus of red, as it were, where, with the declining sun,

that color grows and glows. It is partly borrowed fire, gathering

strength from the sun on its way to your eye. It has only some

comparatively dull red leaves for a rallying-point, or kindling-stuff,

to start it, and it becomes an intense scarlet or red mist, or fire,

which finds fuel for itself in the very atmosphere. So vivacious is

redness. The very rails reflect a rosy light at this hour and season.

You see a redder tree than exists.

If you wish to count the scarlet oaks, do it now. In a clear day stand

thus on a hilltop in the woods, when the sun is an hour high, and

every one within range of your vision, excepting in the west, will be

revealed. You might live to the age of Methuselah and never find a

tithe of them, otherwise. Yet sometimes even in a dark day I have

thought them as bright as I ever saw them. Looking westward, their

colors are lost in a blaze of light; but in other directions the whole

forest is a flower-garden, in which these late roses burn, alternating

with green, while the so-called "gardeners," walking here and there,

perchance, beneath, with spade and water-pot, see only a few little

asters amid withered leaves.

These are _my_ China-asters, _my_ late garden-flowers. It costs me

nothing for a gardener. The falling leaves, all over the forest, are

protecting the roots of my plants. Only look at what is to be seen,

and you will have garden enough, without deepening the soil in your

yard. We have only to elevate our view a little, to see the whole

forest as a garden. The blossoming of the scarlet oak,--the

forest-flower, surpassing all in splendor (at least since the maple)!

I do not know but they interest me more than the maples, they are so

widely and equally dispersed throughout the forest; they are so hardy,

a nobler tree on the whole; our chief November flower, abiding the

approach of winter with us, imparting warmth to early November

prospects. It is remarkable that the latest bright color that is

general should be this deep, dark scarlet and red, the intensest of

colors. The ripest fruit of the year; like the cheek of a hard, glossy

red apple, from the cold Isle of Orleans, which will not be mellow for

eating till next spring! When I rise to a hilltop, a thousand of these

great oak roses, distributed on every side, as far as the horizon! I

admire them four or five miles off! This my unfailing prospect for a

fortnight past! This late forest-flower surpasses all that spring or

summer could do. Their colors were but rare and dainty specks

comparatively (created for the near-sighted, who walk amid the

humblest herbs and underwoods), and made no impression on a distant

eye. Now it is an extended forest or a mountain-side, through or along

which we journey from day to day, that bursts into bloom.

Comparatively, our gardening is on a petty scale,--the gardener still

nursing a few asters amid dead weeds, ignorant of the gigantic asters

and roses which, as it were, overshadow him, and ask for none of his

care. It is like a little red paint ground on a saucer, and held up

against the sunset sky. Why not take more elevated and broader views,

walk in the great garden; not skulk in a little "debauched" nook of

it? consider the beauty of the forest, and not merely of a few

impounded herbs?

Let your walks now be a little more adventurous; ascend the hills. If,

about the last of October, you ascend any hill in the outskirts of our

town, and probably of yours, and look over the forest, you may

see--well, what I have endeavored to describe. All this you surely

_will_ see, and much more, if you are prepared to see it,--if you

_look_ for it. Otherwise, regular and universal as this phenomenon is,

whether you stand on the hilltop or in the hollow, you will think for

threescore years and ten that all the wood is, at this season, sere

and brown. Objects are concealed from our view, not so much because

they are out of the course of our visual ray as because we do not

bring our minds and eyes to bear on them; for there is no power to see

in the eye itself, any more than in any other jelly. We do not realize

how far and widely, or how near and narrowly, we are to look. The

greater part of the phenomena of Nature are for this reason concealed

from us all our lives. The gardener sees only the gardener's garden.

Here, too, as in political economy, the supply answers to the demand.

Nature does not cast pearls before swine. There is just as much

beauty visible to us in the landscape as we are prepared to

appreciate,--not a grain more. The actual objects which one man will

see from a particular hilltop are just as different from those which

another will see as the beholders are different. The scarlet oak must,

in a sense, be in your eye when you go forth. We cannot see anything

until we are possessed with the idea of it, take it into our

heads,--and then we can hardly see anything else. In my botanical

rambles I find that, first, the idea, or image, of a plant occupies my

thoughts, though it may seem very foreign to this locality,--no nearer

than Hudson's Bay,--and for some weeks or months I go thinking of it,

and expecting it, unconsciously, and at length I surely see it. This

is the history of my finding a score or more of rare plants which I

could name. A man sees only what concerns him. A botanist absorbed in

the study of grasses does not distinguish the grandest pasture oaks.

He, as it were, tramples down oaks unwittingly in his walk, or at most

sees only their shadows. I have found that it required a different

intention of the eye, in the same locality, to see different plants,

even when they were closely allied, as _Juncaceae_ and _Gramineae_:

when I was looking for the former, I did not see the latter in the

midst of them. How much more, then, it requires different intentions

of the eye and of the mind to attend to different departments of

knowledge! How differently the poet and the naturalist look at

objects!

Take a New England selectman, and set him on the highest of our hills,

and tell him to look,--sharpening his sight to the utmost, and putting

on the glasses that suit him best (aye, using a spy-glass, if he

likes),--and make a full report. What, probably, will he _spy_?--what

will he _select_ to look at? Of course, he will see a Brocken spectre

of himself. He will see several meeting-houses, at least, and,

perhaps, that somebody ought to be assessed higher than he is, since

he has so handsome a wood-lot. Now take Julius Cæsar, or Emanuel

Swedenborg, or a Fiji-Islander, and set him up there. Or suppose all

together, and let them compare notes afterward. Will it appear that

they have enjoyed the same prospect? What they will see will be as

different as Rome was from heaven or hell, or the last from the Fiji

Islands. For aught we know, as strange a man as any of these is always

at our elbow.

Why, it takes a sharpshooter to bring down even such trivial game as

snipes and woodcocks; he must take very particular aim, and know what

he is aiming at. He would stand a very small chance, if he fired at

random into the sky, being told that snipes were flying there. And so

is it with him that shoots at beauty; though he wait till the sky

falls, he will not bag any, if he does not already know its seasons

and haunts, and the color of its wing,--if he has not dreamed of it,

so that he can _anticipate_ it; then, indeed, he flushes it at every

step, shoots double and on the wing, with both barrels, even in

corn-fields. The sportsman trains himself, dresses, and watches

unweariedly, and loads and primes for his particular game. He prays

for it, and offers sacrifices, and so he gets it. After due and long

preparation, schooling his eye and hand, dreaming awake and asleep,

with gun and paddle and boat, he goes out after meadow-hens, which

most of his townsmen never saw nor dreamed of, and paddles for miles

against a head wind, and wades in water up to his knees, being out all

day without his dinner, and _therefore_ he gets them. He had them

half-way into his bag when he started, and has only to shove them

down. The true sportsman can shoot you almost any of his game from his

windows: what else has he windows or eyes for? It comes and perches at

last on the barrel of his gun; but the rest of the world never see it

_with the feathers on_. The geese fly exactly under his zenith, and

honk when they get there, and he will keep himself supplied by firing

up his chimney; twenty musquash have the refusal of each one of his

traps before it is empty. If he lives, and his game spirit increases,

heaven and earth shall fail him sooner than game; and when he dies, he

will go to more extensive and, perchance, happier hunting-grounds. The

fisherman, too, dreams of fish, sees a bobbing cork in his dreams,

till he can almost catch them in his sink-spout. I knew a girl who,

being sent to pick huckleberries, picked wild gooseberries by the

quart, where no one else knew that there were any, because she was

accustomed to pick them up-country where she came from. The astronomer

knows where to go star-gathering, and sees one clearly in his mind

before any have seen it with a glass. The hen scratches and finds her

food right under where she stands; but such is not the way with the

hawk.

* * * * *

These bright leaves which I have mentioned are not the exception, but

the rule; for I believe that all leaves, even grasses and mosses,

acquire brighter colors just before their fall. When you come to

observe faithfully the changes of each humblest plant, you find that

each has, sooner or later, its peculiar autumnal tint; and if you

undertake to make a complete list of the bright tints, it will be

nearly as long as a catalogue of the plants in your vicinity.

WILD APPLES

THE HISTORY OF THE APPLE TREE

It is remarkable how closely the history of the apple tree is

connected with that of man. The geologist tells us that the order of

the _Rosaceae_, which includes the apple, also the true grasses, and

the _Labiatae_, or mints, were introduced only a short time previous

to the appearance of man on the globe.

It appears that apples made a part of the food of that unknown

primitive people whose traces have lately been found at the bottom of

the Swiss lakes, supposed to be older than the foundation of Rome, so

old that they had no metallic implements. An entire black and

shriveled crab-apple has been recovered from their stores.

Tacitus says of the ancient Germans that they satisfied their hunger

with wild apples (_agrestia poma_), among other things.

Niebuhr observes that "the words for a house, a field, a plow,

plowing, wine, oil, milk, sheep, apples, and others relating to

agriculture and the gentler way of life, agree in Latin and Greek,

while the Latin words for all objects pertaining to war or the chase

are utterly alien from the Greek." Thus the apple tree may be

considered a symbol of peace no less than the olive.

The apple was early so important, and generally distributed, that its

name traced to its root in many languages signifies fruit in general.

Μῆλον, in Greek, means an apple, also the fruit of other trees, also a

sheep and any cattle, and finally riches in general.

The apple tree has been celebrated by the Hebrews, Greeks, Romans, and

Scandinavians. Some have thought that the first human pair were

tempted by its fruit. Goddesses are fabled to have contended for it,

dragons were set to watch it, and heroes were employed to pluck it.

The tree is mentioned in at least three places in the Old Testament,

and its fruit in two or three more. Solomon sings, "As the apple-tree

among the trees of the wood, so is my beloved among the sons." And

again, "Stay me with flagons, comfort me with apples." The noblest

part of man's noblest feature is named from this fruit, "the apple of

the eye."

The apple tree is also mentioned by Homer and Herodotus. Ulysses saw

in the glorious garden of Alcinoûs "pears and pomegranates, and apple

trees bearing beautiful fruit" (καὶ μηλέαι ἀγλαόκαρποι). And according

to Homer, apples were among the fruits which Tantalus could not pluck,

the wind ever blowing their boughs away from him. Theophrastus knew and

described the apple tree as a botanist.

According to the Prose Edda, "Iduna keeps in a box the apples which

the gods, when they feel old age approaching, have only to taste of to

become young again. It is in this manner that they will be kept in

renovated youth until Ragnarôk" (or the destruction of the gods).

I learn from Loudon that "the ancient Welsh bards were rewarded for

excelling in song by the token of the apple-spray;" and "in the

Highlands of Scotland the apple-tree is the badge of the clan Lamont."

The apple tree (_Pyrus malus_) belongs chiefly to the northern

temperate zone. Loudon says that "it grows spontaneously in every part

of Europe except the frigid zone, and throughout Western Asia, China,

and Japan." We have also two or three varieties of the apple

indigenous in North America. The cultivated apple tree was first

introduced into this country by the earliest settlers, and is thought

to do as well or better here than anywhere else. Probably some of the

varieties which are now cultivated were first introduced into Britain

by the Romans.

Pliny, adopting the distinction of Theophrastus, says, "Of trees there

are some which are altogether wild (_sylvestres_), some more civilized

(_urbaniores_)." Theophrastus includes the apple among the last; and,

indeed, it is in this sense the most civilized of all trees. It is as

harmless as a dove, as beautiful as a rose, and as valuable as flocks

and herds. It has been longer cultivated than any other, and so is

more humanized; and who knows but, like the dog, it will at length be

no longer traceable to its wild original? It migrates with man, like

the dog and horse and cow: first, perchance, from Greece to Italy,

thence to England, thence to America; and our Western emigrant is

still marching steadily toward the setting sun with the seeds of the

apple in his pocket, or perhaps a few young trees strapped to his

load. At least a million apple trees are thus set farther westward

this year than any cultivated ones grew last year. Consider how the

Blossom Week, like the Sabbath, is thus annually spreading over the

prairies; for when man migrates, he carries with him not only his

birds, quadrupeds, insects, vegetables, and his very sward, but his

orchard also.

The leaves and tender twigs are an agreeable food to many domestic

animals, as the cow, horse, sheep, and goat; and the fruit is sought

after by the first, as well as by the hog. Thus there appears to have

existed a natural alliance between these animals and this tree from

the first. "The fruit of the crab in the forests of France" is said to

be "a great resource for the wild boar."

Not only the Indian, but many indigenous insects, birds, and

quadrupeds, welcomed the apple tree to these shores. The tent

caterpillar saddled her eggs on the very first twig that was formed,

and it has since shared her affections with the wild cherry; and the

canker-worm also in a measure abandoned the elm to feed on it. As it

grew apace, the bluebird, robin, cherry-bird, kingbird, and many more

came with haste and built their nests and warbled in its boughs, and

so became orchard-birds, and multiplied more than ever. It was an era

in the history of their race. The downy woodpecker found such a savory

morsel under its bark that he perforated it in a ring quite round the

tree, before he left it,--a thing which he had never done before, to

my knowledge. It did not take the partridge long to find out how sweet

its buds were, and every winter eve she flew, and still flies, from

the wood, to pluck them, much to the farmer's sorrow. The rabbit, too,

was not slow to learn the taste of its twigs and bark; and when the

fruit was ripe, the squirrel half rolled, half carried it to his hole;

and even the musquash crept up the bank from the brook at evening, and

greedily devoured it, until he had worn a path in the grass there; and

when it was frozen and thawed, the crow and the jay were glad to taste

it occasionally. The owl crept into the first apple tree that became

hollow, and fairly hooted with delight, finding it just the place for

him; so, settling down into it, he has remained there ever since.

My theme being the Wild Apple, I will merely glance at some of the

seasons in the annual growth of the cultivated apple, and pass on to

my special province.

The flowers of the apple are perhaps the most beautiful of any tree's,

so copious and so delicious to both sight and scent. The walker is

frequently tempted to turn and linger near some more than usually

handsome one, whose blossoms are two-thirds expanded. How superior it

is in these respects to the pear, whose blossoms are neither colored

nor fragrant!

By the middle of July, green apples are so large as to remind us of

coddling, and of the autumn. The sward is commonly strewed with little

ones which fall stillborn, as it were,--Nature thus thinning them for

us. The Roman writer Palladius said, "If apples are inclined to fall

before their time, a stone placed in a split root will retain them."

Some such notion, still surviving, may account for some of the stones

which we see placed, to be overgrown, in the forks of trees. They have

a saying in Suffolk, England,--

"At Michaelmas time, or a little before,

Half an apple goes to the core."

Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think

that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth

more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell

in the shops. The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten,

along with that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I pick up in the

road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona,--carrying

me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and

ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills.

A week or two later, as you are going by orchards or gardens,

especially in the evenings, you pass through a little region possessed

by the fragrance of ripe apples, and thus enjoy them without price,

and without robbing anybody.

There is thus about all natural products a certain volatile and

ethereal quality which represents their highest value, and which

cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold. No mortal has ever enjoyed

the perfect flavor of any fruit, and only the godlike among men begin

to taste its ambrosial qualities. For nectar and ambrosia are only

those fine flavors of every earthly fruit which our coarse palates

fail to perceive,--just as we occupy the heaven of the gods without

knowing it. When I see a particularly mean man carrying a load of fair

and fragrant early apples to market, I seem to see a contest going on

between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the

other, and, to my mind, the apples always gain it. Pliny says that

apples are the heaviest of all things, and that the oxen begin to

sweat at the mere sight of a load of them. Our driver begins to lose

his load the moment he tries to transport them to where they do not

belong, that is, to any but the most beautiful. Though he gets out

from time to time, and feels of them, and thinks they are all there, I

see the stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities going to

heaven from his cart, while the pulp and skin and core only are going

to market. They are not apples, but pomace. Are not these still

Iduna's apples, the taste of which keeps the gods forever young? and

think you that they will let Loki or Thjassi carry them off to

Jötunheim, while they grow wrinkled and gray? No, for Ragnarök, or the

destruction of the gods, is not yet.

There is another thinning of the fruit, commonly near the end of

August or in September, when the ground is strewn with windfalls; and

this happens especially when high winds occur after rain. In some

orchards you may see fully three quarters of the whole crop on the

ground, lying in a circular form beneath the trees, yet hard and

green, or, if it is a hillside, rolled far down the hill. However, it

is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. All the country over,

people are busy picking up the windfalls, and this will make them

cheap for early apple pies.

In October, the leaves falling, the apples are more distinct on the

trees. I saw one year in a neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit

than I remember to have ever seen before, small yellow apples hanging

over the road. The branches were gracefully drooping with their

weight, like a barberry bush, so that the whole tree acquired a new

character. Even the topmost branches, instead of standing erect,

spread and drooped in all directions; and there were so many poles

supporting the lower ones that they looked like pictures of banyan

trees. As an old English manuscript says, "The mo appelen the tree

bereth the more sche boweth to the folk."

Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits. Let the most beautiful or

the swiftest have it. That should be the "going" price of apples.

Between the 5th and 20th of October I see the barrels lie under the

trees. And perhaps I talk with one who is selecting some choice

barrels to fulfill an order. He turns a specked one over many times

before he leaves it out. If I were to tell what is passing in my mind,

I should say that every one was specked which he had handled; for he

rubs off all the bloom, and those fugacious ethereal qualities leave

it. Cool evenings prompt the farmers to make haste, and at length I

see only the ladders here and there left leaning against the trees.

It would be well, if we accepted these gifts with more joy and

gratitude, and did not think it enough simply to put a fresh load of

compost about the tree. Some old English customs are suggestive at

least. I find them described chiefly in Brand's "Popular Antiquities."

It appears that "on Christmas Eve the farmers and their men in

Devonshire take a large bowl of cider, with a toast in it, and

carrying it in state to the orchard, they salute the apple-trees with

much ceremony, in order to make them bear well the next season." This

salutation consists in "throwing some of the cider about the roots of

the tree, placing bits of the toast on the branches," and then,

"encircling one of the best bearing trees in the orchard, they drink

the following toast three several times:--

'Here's to thee, old apple tree,

Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow,

And whence thou mayst bear apples enow!

Hats-full! caps-full!

Bushel, bushel, sacks-full!

And my pockets full, too! Hurra!'"

Also what was called "apple-howling" used to be practiced in various

counties of England on New Year's Eve. A troop of boys visited the

different orchards, and, encircling the apple trees, repeated the

following words:--

"Stand fast, root! bear well, top!

Pray God send us a good howling crop:

Every twig, apples big;

Every bough, apples enow!"

"They then shout in chorus, one of the boys accompanying them on a

cow's horn. During this ceremony they rap the trees with their

sticks." This is called "wassailing" the trees, and is thought by some

to be "a relic of the heathen sacrifice to Pomona."

Herrick sings,--

"Wassaile the trees that they may beare

You many a plum and many a peare;

For more or less fruits they will bring

As you so give them wassailing."

Our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine;

but it behooves them to sing better than English Phillips did, else

they will do no credit to their Muse.

THE WILD APPLE

So much for the more civilized apple trees (_urbaniores_, as Pliny

calls them). I love better to go through the old orchards of ungrafted

apple trees, at what ever season of the year,--so irregularly planted:

sometimes two trees standing close together; and the rows so devious

that you would think that they not only had grown while the owner was

sleeping, but had been set out by him in a somnambulic state. The rows

of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them like these.

But I now, alas, speak rather from memory than from any recent

experience, such ravages have been made!

Some soils, like a rocky tract called the Easterbrooks Country in my

neighborhood, are so suited to the apple, that it will grow faster in

them without any care, or if only the ground is broken up once a year,

than it will in many places with any amount of care. The owners of

this tract allow that the soil is excellent for fruit, but they say

that it is so rocky that they have not patience to plow it, and that,

together with the distance, is the reason why it is not cultivated.

There are, or were recently, extensive orchards there standing without

order. Nay, they spring up wild and bear well there in the midst of

pines, birches, maples, and oaks. I am often surprised to see rising

amid these trees the rounded tops of apple trees glowing with red or

yellow fruit, in harmony with the autumnal tints of the forest.

Going up the side of a cliff about the first of November, I saw a

vigorous young apple tree, which, planted by birds or cows, had shot

up amid the rocks and open woods there, and had now much fruit on it,

uninjured by the frosts, when all cultivated apples were gathered. It

was a rank, wild growth, with many green leaves on it still, and made

an impression of thorniness. The fruit was hard and green, but looked

as if it would be palatable in the winter. Some was dangling on the

twigs, but more half buried in the wet leaves under the tree, or

rolled far down the hill amid the rocks. The owner knows nothing of

it. The day was not observed when it first blossomed, nor when it

first bore fruit, unless by the chickadee. There was no dancing on the

green beneath it in its honor, and now there is no hand to pluck its

fruit,--which is only gnawed by squirrels, as I perceive. It has done

double duty,--not only borne this crop, but each twig has grown a foot

into the air. And this is _such_ fruit! bigger than many berries, we

must admit, and carried home will be sound and palatable next spring.

What care I for Iduna's apples so long as I can get these?

When I go by this shrub thus late and hardy, and see its dangling

fruit, I respect the tree, and I am grateful for Nature's bounty, even

though I cannot eat it. Here on this rugged and woody hillside has

grown an apple tree, not planted by man, no relic of a former orchard,

but a natural growth, like the pines and oaks. Most fruits which we

prize and use depend entirely on our care. Corn and grain, potatoes,

peaches, melons, etc., depend altogether on our planting; but the

apple emulates man's independence and enterprise. It is not simply

carried, as I have said, but, like him, to some extent, it has

migrated to this New World, and is even, here and there, making its

way amid the aboriginal trees; just as the ox and dog and horse

sometimes run wild and maintain themselves.

[Illustration: _Wild Apple Tree_]

Even the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable

position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit.

THE CRAB

Nevertheless, _our_ wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance,

who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the

woods from the cultivated stock. Wilder still, as I have said, there

grows elsewhere in this country a native and aboriginal crab-apple,

_Malus coronaria_, "whose nature has not yet been modified by

cultivation." It is found from western New York to Minnesota, and

southward. Michaux says that its ordinary height "is fifteen or

eighteen feet, but it is sometimes found twenty-five or thirty feet

high," and that the large ones "exactly resemble the common apple

tree." "The flowers are white mingled with rose color, and are

collected in corymbs." They are remarkable for their delicious odor.

The fruit, according to him, is about an inch and a half in diameter,

and is intensely acid. Yet they make fine sweetmeats and also cider of

them. He concludes that "if, on being cultivated, it does not yield

new and palatable varieties, it will at least be celebrated for the

beauty of its flowers, and for the sweetness of its perfume."

I never saw the crab-apple till May, 1861. I had heard of it through

Michaux, but more modern botanists, so far as I know, have not

treated it as of any peculiar importance. Thus it was a half-fabulous

tree to me. I contemplated a pilgrimage to the "Glades," a portion of

Pennsylvania where it was said to grow to perfection. I thought of

sending to a nursery for it, but doubted if they had it, or would

distinguish it from European varieties. At last I had occasion to go

to Minnesota, and on entering Michigan I began to notice from the cars

a tree with handsome rose-colored flowers. At first I thought it some

variety of thorn; but it was not long before the truth flashed on me,

that this was my long-sought crab-apple. It was the prevailing

flowering shrub or tree to be seen from the cars at that season of the

year,--about the middle of May. But the cars never stopped before one,

and so I was launched on the bosom of the Mississippi without having

touched one, experiencing the fate of Tantalus. On arriving at St.

Anthony's Falls, I was sorry to be told that I was too far north for

the crab-apple. Nevertheless I succeeded in finding it about eight

miles west of the Falls; touched it and smelled it, and secured a

lingering corymb of flowers for my herbarium. This must have been near

its northern limit.

HOW THE WILD APPLE GROWS

But though these are indigenous, like the Indians, I doubt whether

they are any hardier than those backwoodsmen among the apple trees,

which, though descended from cultivated stocks, plant themselves in

distant fields and forests, where the soil is favorable to them. I

know of no trees which have more difficulties to contend with, and

which more sturdily resist their foes. These are the ones whose story

we have to tell. It oftentimes reads thus:--

Near the beginning of May, we notice little thickets of apple trees

just springing up in the pastures where cattle have been,--as the

rocky ones of our Easterbrooks Country, or the top of Nobscot Hill, in

Sudbury. One or two of these, perhaps, survive the drought and other

accidents,--their very birthplace defending them against the

encroaching grass and some other dangers, at first.

In two years' time 't had thus

Reached the level of the rocks,

Admired the stretching world,

Nor feared the wandering flocks.

But at this tender age

Its sufferings began:

There came a browsing ox

And cut it down a span.

This time, perhaps, the ox does not notice it amid the grass; but the

next year, when it has grown more stout, he recognizes it for a

fellow-emigrant from the old country, the flavor of whose leaves and

twigs he well knows; and though at first he pauses to welcome it, and

express his surprise, and gets for answer, "The same cause that

brought you here brought me," he nevertheless browses it again,

reflecting, it may be, that he has some title to it.

Thus cut down annually, it does not despair; but, putting forth two

short twigs for every one cut off, it spreads out low along the ground

in the hollows or between the rocks, growing more stout and scrubby,

until it forms, not a tree as yet, but a little pyramidal, stiff,

twiggy mass, almost as solid and impenetrable as a rock. Some of the

densest and most impenetrable clumps of bushes that I have ever seen,

as well on account of the closeness and stubbornness of their branches

as of their thorns, have been these wild apple scrubs. They are more

like the scrubby fir and black spruce on which you stand, and

sometimes walk, on the tops of mountains, where cold is the demon they

contend with, than anything else. No wonder they are prompted to grow

thorns at last, to defend themselves against such foes. In their

thorniness, however, there is no malice, only some malic acid.

The rocky pastures of the tract I have referred to--for they maintain

their ground best in a rocky field--are thickly sprinkled with these

little tufts, reminding you often of some rigid gray mosses or

lichens, and you see thousands of little trees just springing up

between them, with the seed still attached to them.

Being regularly clipped all around each year by the cows, as a hedge

with shears, they are often of a perfect conical or pyramidal form,

from one to four feet high, and more or less sharp, as if trimmed by

the gardener's art. In the pastures on Nobscot Hill and its spurs,

they make fine dark shadows when the sun is low. They are also an

excellent covert from hawks for many small birds that roost and build

in them. Whole flocks perch in them at night, and I have seen three

robins' nests in one which was six feet in diameter.

No doubt many of these are already old trees, if you reckon from the

day they were planted, but infants still when you consider their

development and the long life before them. I counted the annual rings

of some which were just one foot high, and as wide as high, and found

that they were about twelve years old, but quite sound and thrifty!

They were so low that they were unnoticed by the walker, while many of

their contemporaries from the nurseries were already bearing

considerable crops. But what you gain in time is perhaps in this case,

too, lost in power,--that is, in the vigor of the tree. This is their

pyramidal state.

The cows continue to browse them thus for twenty years or more,

keeping them down and compelling them to spread, until at last they

are so broad that they become their own fence, when some interior

shoot, which their foes cannot reach, darts upward with joy: for it

has not forgotten its high calling, and bears its own peculiar fruit

in triumph.

Such are the tactics by which it finally defeats its bovine foes. Now,

if you have watched the progress of a particular shrub, you will see

that it is no longer a simple pyramid or cone, but that out of its

apex there rises a sprig or two, growing more lustily perchance than

an orchard-tree, since the plant now devotes the whole of its

repressed energy to these upright parts. In a short time these become

a small tree, an inverted pyramid resting on the apex of the other, so

that the whole has now the form of a vast hour-glass. The spreading

bottom, having served its purpose, finally disappears, and the

generous tree permits the now harmless cows to come in and stand in

its shade, and rub against and redden its trunk, which has grown in

spite of them, and even to taste a part of its fruit, and so disperse

the seed.

Thus the cows create their own shade and food; and the tree, its

hour-glass being inverted, lives a second life, as it were.

It is an important question with some nowadays, whether you should

trim young apple trees as high as your nose or as high as your eyes.

The ox trims them up as high as he can reach, and that is about the

right height, I think.

In spite of wandering kine, and other adverse circumstances, that

despised shrub, valued only by small birds as a covert and shelter

from hawks, has its blossom week at last, and in course of time its

harvest, sincere, though small.

By the end of some October, when its leaves have fallen, I frequently

see such a central sprig, whose progress I have watched, when I

thought it had forgotten its destiny, as I had, bearing its first crop

of small green or yellow or rosy fruit, which the cows cannot get at

over the bushy and thorny hedge which surrounds it, and I make haste

to taste the new and undescribed variety. We have all heard of the

numerous varieties of fruit invented by Van Mons and Knight. This is

the system of Van Cow, and she has invented far more and more

memorable varieties than both of them.

Through what hardships it may attain to bear a sweet fruit! Though

somewhat small, it may prove equal, if not superior, in flavor to that

which has grown in a garden,--will perchance be all the sweeter and

more palatable for the very difficulties it has had to contend with.

Who knows but this chance wild fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on

some remote and rocky hillside, where it is as yet unobserved by man,

may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear

of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of

the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,--at

least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter and

the Baldwin grew.

Every wild apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every

wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to

man! So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the

celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by

fate; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself

and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its

perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. Poets and philosophers and

statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the

hosts of unoriginal men.

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the

golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed

dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck

them.

This is one, and the most remarkable way in which the wild apple is

propagated; but commonly it springs up at wide intervals in woods and

swamp, and by the sides of roads, as the soil may suit it, and grows

with comparative rapidity. Those which grow in dense woods are very

tall and slender. I frequently pluck from these trees a perfectly

mild and tamed fruit. As Palladius says, "_Et injussu consternitur

ubere mali_:" And the ground is strewn with the fruit of an unbidden

apple tree.

It is an old notion that, if these wild trees do not bear a valuable

fruit of their own, they are the best stocks by which to transmit to

posterity the most highly prized qualities of others. However, I am

not in search of stocks, but the wild fruit itself, whose fierce gust

has suffered no "inteneration." It is not my

"highest plot

To plant the Bergamot."

THE FRUIT, AND ITS FLAVOR

The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of

November. They then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they

are still perhaps as beautiful as ever. I make a great account of

these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to

gather,--wild flavors of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting. The

farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken,

unless he has a walker's appetite and imagination, neither of which

can he have.

Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of November,

I presume that the owner does not mean to gather. They belong to

children as wild as themselves,--to certain active boys that I

know,--to the wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes

amiss, who gleans after all the world, and, moreover, to us walkers.

We have met with them, and they are ours. These rights, long enough

insisted upon, have come to be an institution in some old countries,

where they have learned how to live. I hear that "the custom of

grippling, which may be called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly,

practiced in Herefordshire. It consists in leaving a few apples, which

are called the gripples, on every tree, after the general gathering,

for the boys, who go with climbing-poles and bags to collect them."

As for those I speak of, I pluck them as a wild fruit, native to this

quarter of the earth,--fruit of old trees that have been dying ever

since I was a boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the

woodpecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, who has not

faith enough to look under their boughs. From the appearance of the

tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect nothing but lichens

to drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground

strewn with spirited fruit,--some of it, perhaps, collected at

squirrel-holes, with the marks of their teeth by which they carried

them,--some containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and

some, especially in damp days, a shell-less snail. The very sticks and

stones lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the

savoriness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought after in past

years.

I have seen no account of these among the "Fruits and Fruit-Trees of

America," though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted

kinds; more racy and wild American flavors do they possess when

October and November, when December and January, and perhaps February

and March even, have assuaged them somewhat. An old farmer in my

neighborhood, who always selects the right word, says that "they have

a kind of bow-arrow tang."

Apples for grafting appear to have been selected commonly, not so much

for their spirited flavor, as for their mildness, their size, and

bearing qualities,--not so much for their beauty, as for their

fairness and soundness. Indeed, I have no faith in the selected lists

of pomological gentlemen. Their "Favorites" and "None-suches" and

"Seek-no-farthers," when I have fruited them, commonly turn out very

tame and forgettable. They are eaten with comparatively little zest,

and have no real _tang_ nor _smack_ to them.

What if some of these wildings are acrid and puckery, genuine

_verjuice_, do they not still belong to the _Pomaceæ_, which are

uniformly innocent and kind to our race? I still begrudge them to the

cider-mill. Perhaps they are not fairly ripe yet.

No wonder that these small and high-colored apples are thought to make

the best cider. Loudon quotes from the "Herefordshire Report," that

"apples of a small size are always, if equal in quality, to be

preferred to those of a larger size, in order that the rind and kernel

may bear the greatest proportion to the pulp, which affords the

weakest and most watery juice." And he says that, "to prove this, Dr.

Symonds, of Hereford, about the year 1800, made one hogshead of cider

entirely from the rinds and cores of apples, and another from the pulp

only, when the first was found of extraordinary strength and flavor,

while the latter was sweet and insipid."

Evelyn says that the "Red-strake" was the favorite cider-apple in his

day; and he quotes one Dr. Newburg as saying, "In Jersey 'tis a

general observation, as I hear, that the more of red any apple has in

its rind, the more proper it is for this use. Pale-faced apples they

exclude as much as may be from their cider-vat." This opinion still

prevails.

All apples are good in November. Those which the farmer leaves out as

unsalable and unpalatable to those who frequent the markets are

choicest fruit to the walker. But it is remarkable that the wild apple,

which I praise as so spirited and racy when eaten in the fields or

woods, being brought into the house has frequently a harsh and crabbed

taste. The Saunterer's Apple not even the saunterer can eat in the

house. The palate rejects it there, as it does haws and acorns, and

demands a tamed one; for there you miss the November air, which is the

sauce it is to be eaten with. Accordingly, when Tityrus, seeing the

lengthening shadows, invites Melibœus to go home and pass the night

with him, he promises him _mild_ apples and soft chestnuts,--_mitia

poma_, _castaneæ molles_. I frequently pluck wild apples of so rich

and spicy a flavor that I wonder all orchardists do not get a scion

from that tree, and I fail not to bring home my pockets full. But

perchance, when I take one out of my desk and taste it in my chamber,

I find it unexpectedly crude,--sour enough to set a squirrel's teeth

on edge and make a jay scream.

These apples have hung in the wind and frost and rain till they have

absorbed the qualities of the weather or season, and thus are highly

_seasoned_, and they _pierce_ and _sting_ and _permeate_ us with their

spirit. They must be eaten in _season_, accordingly,--that is,

out-of-doors.

To appreciate the wild and sharp flavors of these October fruits, it

is necessary that you be breathing the sharp October or November air.

The outdoor air and exercise which the walker gets give a different

tone to his palate, and he craves a fruit which the sedentary would

call harsh and crabbed. They must be eaten in the fields, when your

system is all aglow with exercise, when the frosty weather nips your

fingers, the wind rattles the bare boughs or rustles the few remaining

leaves, and the jay is heard screaming around. What is sour in the

house a bracing walk makes sweet. Some of these apples might be

labeled, "To be eaten in the wind."

Of course no flavors are thrown away; they are intended for the taste

that is up to them. Some apples have two distinct flavors, and perhaps

one half of them must be eaten in the house, the other outdoors. One

Peter Whitney wrote from Northborough in 1782, for the Proceedings of

the Boston Academy, describing an apple tree in that town "producing

fruit of opposite qualities, part of the same apple being frequently

sour and the other sweet;" also some all sour, and others all sweet,

and this diversity on all parts of the tree.

There is a wild apple on Nawshawtuct Hill in my town which has to me a

peculiarly pleasant bitter tang, not perceived till it is

three-quarters tasted. It remains on the tongue. As you eat it, it

smells exactly like a squash-bug. It is a sort of triumph to eat and

relish it.

I hear that the fruit of a kind of plum tree in Provence is "called

_Prunes sibarelles_, because it is impossible to whistle after having

eaten them, from their sourness." But perhaps they were only eaten in

the house and in summer, and if tried out-of-doors in a stinging

atmosphere, who knows but you could whistle an octave higher and

clearer?

In the fields only are the sours and bitters of Nature appreciated;

just as the woodchopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle

of a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there, and dreams

of summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a chamber, would

make a student miserable. They who are at work abroad are not cold,

but rather it is they who sit shivering in houses. As with

temperatures, so with flavors; as with cold and heat, so with sour and

sweet. This natural raciness, the sours and bitters which the diseased

palate refuses, are the true condiments.

Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. To appreciate

the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses,

_papillæ_ firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily

flattened and tamed.

From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may

be reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the

civilized man rejects. The former has the palate of an outdoor man. It

takes a savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of

life, the apple of the world, then!

"Nor is it every apple I desire,

Nor that which pleases every palate best;

'Tis not the lasting Deuxan I require,

Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request,

Nor that which first beshrewed the name of wife,

Nor that whose beauty caused the golden strife:

No, no! bring me an apple from the tree of life."

So there is one _thought_ for the field, another for the house. I

would have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and

will not warrant them to be palatable if tasted in the house.

THEIR BEAUTY

Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and

crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming

traits even to the eye. You will discover some evening redness dashed

or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that

the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some

part of its sphere. It will have some red stains, commemorating the

mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches,

in memory of the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over

it; and a spacious field of green reflecting the general face of

nature,--green even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a

milder flavor,--yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills.

Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair,--apples not of Discord, but of

Concord! Yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share.

Painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or

crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the

influence of the sun on all sides alike,--some with the faintest pink

blush imaginable,--some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow, or

with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from the

stem-dimple to the blossom end, like meridional lines, on a

straw-colored ground,--some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine

lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less

confluent and fiery when wet,--and others gnarly, and freckled or

peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white

ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of Him who paints

the autumn leaves. Others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused

with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat,--apple of

the Hesperides, apple of the evening sky! But like shells and pebbles

on the seashore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid the withering

leaves in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie

in the wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded in the

house.

THE NAMING OF THEM

It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred

varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not

tax a man's invention,--no one to be named after a man, and all in the

_lingua vernacula_? Who shall stand godfather at the christening of

the wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if

they were used, and make the _lingua vernacula_ flag. We should have

to call in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn

woods and the wild-flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch

and the squirrel and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveler

and the truant boy, to our aid.

In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society

more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. But here are species which

they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which

our crab might yield to cultivation.

Let us enumerate a few of these. I find myself compelled, after all,

to give the Latin names of some for the benefit of those who live

where English is not spoken,--for they are likely to have a world-wide

reputation.

There is, first of all, the Wood Apple (_Malus sylvatica_); the

Blue-Jay Apple; the Apple which grows in Dells in the Woods

(_sylvestrivallis_), also in Hollows in Pastures (_campestrivallis_);

the Apple that grows in an old Cellar-Hole (_Malus cellaris_); the

Meadow Apple; the Partridge Apple; the Truant's Apple (_cessatoris_),

which no boy will ever go by without knocking off some, however _late_

it may be; the Saunterer's Apple,--you must lose yourself before you

can find the way to that; the Beauty of the Air (_decus aëris_);

December-Eating; the Frozen-Thawed (_gelato-soluta_), good only in

that state; the Concord Apple, possibly the same with the

_Musketaquidensis_; the Assabet Apple; the Brindled Apple; Wine of New

England; the Chickaree Apple; the Green Apple (_Malus viridis_),--this

has many synonyms: in an imperfect state, it is the _choleramorbifera

aut dysenterifera_, _puerulis dilectissima_; the Apple which Atalanta

stopped to pick up; the Hedge Apple (_Malus sepium_); the Slug Apple

(_limacea_); the Railroad Apple, which perhaps came from a core thrown

out of the cars; the Apple whose Fruit we tasted in our Youth; our

Particular Apple, not to be found in any catalogue; _pedestrium

solatium_; also the Apple where hangs the Forgotten Scythe; Iduna's

Apples, and the Apples which Loki found in the Wood; and a great many

more I have on my list, too numerous to mention,--all of them good. As

Bodæus exclaims, referring to the cultivated kinds, and adapting

Virgil to his case, so I, adapting Bodæus,--

"Not if I had a hundred tongues, a hundred mouths,

An iron voice, could I describe all the forms

And reckon up all the names of these _wild apples_."

THE LAST GLEANING

By the middle of November the wild apples have lost some of their

brilliancy, and have chiefly fallen. A great part are decayed on the

ground, and the sound ones are more palatable than before. The note of

the chickadee sounds now more distinct, as you wander amid the old

trees, and the autumnal dandelion is half closed and tearful. But

still, if you are a skillful gleaner, you may get many a pocketful

even of grafted fruit, long after apples are supposed to be gone

out-of-doors. I know a Blue Pearmain tree, growing within the edge of

a swamp, almost as good as wild. You would not suppose that there was

any fruit left there, on the first survey, but you must look according

to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or

perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the

wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes, I explore amid the

bare alders and the huckleberry bushes and the withered sedge, and in

the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under

the fallen and decaying ferns, which, with apple and alder leaves,

thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen

into hollows long since and covered up by the leaves of the tree

itself,--a proper kind of packing. From these lurking-places, anywhere

within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit, all wet

and glossy, maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, and

perhaps with a leaf or two cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript

from a monastery's mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it,

and at least as ripe and well-kept, if not better than those in

barrels, more crisp and lively than they. If these resources fail to

yield anything, I have learned to look between the bases of the

suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and

then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder-clump, where

they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smelled them

out. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue Pearmain, I fill

my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve,

being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this

side, and then from that, to keep my balance.

I learn from Topsell's Gesner, whose authority appears to be Albertus,

that the following is the way in which the hedgehog collects and

carries home his apples. He says,--"His meat is apples, worms, or

grapes: when he findeth apples or grapes on the earth, he rolleth

himself upon them, until he have filled all his prickles, and then

carrieth them home to his den, never bearing above one in his mouth;

and if it fortune that one of them fall off by the way, he likewise

shaketh off all the residue, and walloweth upon them afresh, until

they be all settled upon his back again. So, forth he goeth, making a

noise like a cart-wheel; and if he have any young ones in his nest,

they pull off his load wherewithal he is loaded, eating thereof what

they please, and laying up the residue for the time to come."

THE "FROZEN-THAWED" APPLE

Toward the end of November, though some of the sound ones are yet more

mellow and perhaps more edible, they have generally, like the leaves,

lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. It is finger-cold, and

prudent farmers get in their barreled apples, and bring you the apples

and cider which they have engaged; for it is time to put them into the

cellar. Perhaps a few on the ground show their red cheeks above the

early snow, and occasionally some even preserve their color and

soundness under the snow throughout the winter. But generally at the

beginning of the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though undecayed,

acquire the color of a baked apple.

Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first

thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite

unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while

sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them,--for they are extremely

sensitive to its rays,--are found to be filled with a rich, sweet

cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I

am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this

state, and your jaws are the cider-press. Others, which have more

substance, are a sweet and luscious food,--in my opinion of more worth

than the pineapples which are imported from the West Indies. Those

which lately even I tasted only to repent of it,--for I am

semicivilized,--which the farmer willingly left on the tree, I am now

glad to find have the property of hanging on like the leaves of the

young oaks. It is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling. Let the

frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or

a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to have borrowed a

flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in which they hang.

Or perchance you find, when you get home, that those which rattled in

your pocket have thawed, and the ice is turned to cider. But after the

third or fourth freezing and thawing they will not be found so good.

What are the imported half-ripe fruits of the torrid south, to this

fruit matured by the cold of the frigid north? These are those crabbed

apples with which I cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that

I might tempt him to eat. Now we both greedily fill our pockets with

them,--bending to drink the cup and save our lappets from the

overflowing juice,--and grow more social with their wine. Was there

one that hung so high and sheltered by the tangled branches that our

sticks could not dislodge it?

It is a fruit never carried to market, that I am aware of,--quite

distinct from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and

cider,--and it is not every winter that produces it in perfection.

The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will

probably become extinct in New England. You may still wander through

old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part

went to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. I have heard of an

orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples

rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side,

and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider.

Since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted

fruit, no native apple trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted

pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out.

I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not

know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are

many pleasures which he will not know! Notwithstanding the prevalence

of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if so extensive orchards are

set out to-day in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast

straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank

apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost

nothing but the trouble of setting them out. Men could afford then to

stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. I see

nobody planting trees to-day in such out of the way places, along the

lonely roads and lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now

that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, they collect

them into a plat by their houses, and fence them in,--and the end of

it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a

barrel.

This is "The word of the Lord that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.

"Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land!

Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers?...

"That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that

which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which

the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten.

"Awake, ye drunkards, and weep; and howl, all ye drinkers of wine,

because of the new wine; for it is cut off from your mouth.

"For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number,

whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek teeth of a

great lion.

"He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig tree: he hath made it

clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white....

"Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen; howl, O ye vinedressers....

"The vine is dried up, and the fig tree languisheth; the pomegranate

tree, the palm tree also, and the apple tree, even all the trees of

the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the sons of

men."

NIGHT AND MOONLIGHT

Chancing to take a memorable walk by moonlight some years ago, I

resolved to take more such walks, and make acquaintance with another

side of nature: I have done so.

According to Pliny, there is a stone in Arabia called Selenites,

"wherein is a white, which increases and decreases with the moon." My

journal for the last year or two has been _selenitic_ in this sense.

Is not the midnight like Central Africa to most of us? Are we not

tempted to explore it,--to penetrate to the shores of its Lake Tchad,

and discover the source of its Nile, perchance the Mountains of the

Moon? Who knows what fertility and beauty, moral and natural, are

there to be found? In the Mountains of the Moon, in the Central Africa

of the night, there is where all Niles have their hidden heads. The

expeditions up the Nile as yet extend but to the Cataracts, or

perchance to the mouth of the White Nile; but it is the Black Nile

that concerns us.

I shall be a benefactor if I conquer some realms from the night, if I

report to the gazettes anything transpiring about us at that season

worthy of their attention,--if I can show men that there is some

beauty awake while they are asleep,--if I add to the domains of

poetry.

Night is certainly more novel and less profane than day. I soon

discovered that I was acquainted only with its complexion, and as for

the moon, I had seen her only as it were through a crevice in a

shutter, occasionally. Why not walk a little way in her light?

Suppose you attend to the suggestions which the moon makes for one

month, commonly in vain, will it not be very different from anything

in literature or religion? But why not study this Sanskrit? What if

one moon has come and gone with its world of poetry, its weird

teachings, its oracular suggestions,--so divine a creature freighted

with hints for me, and I have not used her? One moon gone by

unnoticed?