Mr. Burroughs thinks it a sure sign of age when a man no longer cares for apples, and in another of his papers says that his old hollow apple-tree, unlike most persons, always wears "a girdle of perpetual youth" in the new green ring which annually surrounds its trunk.

Bryant has a poem entitled "The Planting of the Apple-Tree," this stanza of which is especially suggestive:

What plant we in this apple-tree?
Fruits that shall swell in sunny June,
And redden in the August noon,
And drop, when gentle airs come by,
That fan the blue September sky,

While children come, with cries of glee,
And seek them where the fragrant grass
Betrays their bed to those who pass
At the foot of the apple-tree."

In Holland's "Bitter-Sweet," again, is another fine description of the varieties of apples in the bins near the barrels of cider in the cellar, as follows:

'That is a barrel of russets;

But we can hardly discuss its
Spheres of frost and flint,
Till, smitten by thoughts of spring,
And the old tree blossoming,

Their bronze takes a yellower tint,

And the pulp grows mellower in 't.

But oh! when they 're sick with the savors

Of sweets that they dream of,

Sure, all the toothsomest flavors

They hold the cream of!

"Those are the Rhode Island greenings;

Excellent apples for pies :

But perhaps Thoreau's essay upon "Wild Apples" is the best known, as it is also the raciest in its style and appreciation. How he enjoyed them! Let him tell his own story of his gleaning, in a passage justly famous as perhaps the classic in the literature of the apple:

"I know a Blue-Pearmain tree, growing within the edge of a swamp, almost as good as wild. You would not suppose 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 moldy 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 alderclump, 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."

And with his words I close my paper, hoping that we shall all see our bins and barrels full for the winter.

A BOUGH OF APPLES.

SICKLES.

HARVEST.

"Fling wide the grain; we give the fields
The ears that nod in summer's gale,
The shining stems that summer gilds,
The harvest that o'erflows the vale,
And swells, an amber sea, between
The full-leaved woods, its shores of green.
Hark! from the murmuring clods I hear
Glad voices of the coming year;

The song of him who binds the grain,
The shout of those that load the wain,
And from the distant grange there comes

The clatter of the thresher's flail,

And steadily the millstone hums
Down in the willowy vale."

-Bryant.

HE term harvest, as it is generally under

stood in the country, is limited to the time when the ripened grain is cut and garnered into the barns. Yet the real harvest lasts longer than that. The berry season and haying immediately precede and often accompany the reaping of the grain, and we are surely still getting in our crops when we pick the last apple of October. Are not these, then, also a part of the harvest? Indeed, all summer and autumn, even till the last stalk of corn is cut and the rustling shocks lie scattered in corn husking in November, are but the gathering in of the products from the seeds of the previous fall and the blossoms of the spring.

Let us turn to the hayfield while the men are there. It is no wonder the cows love clover. See it turn over,

with its pink blossoms, as the mower cuts it! Aye,

't were better could we but see more of it.

There are

some fine lines in one of Joaquin Miller's poems, "The Arizonian:"

"And I have said, and I say it ever,

As the years go on and the world goes over,
'T were better to be content and clever,

In the tending of cattle and the tossing of clover,
In the grazing of cattle and growing of grain,
Than a strong man striving for fame or gain,
Be even as kine in the red-tipped clover;

Be even as clover with its crown of blossoms,
Even as blossoms ere the bloom is shed,
Kiss'd by the kine and the brown sweet bee."

Whittier felt the poetry of hay-making. His "Maud Muller" is probably the best known poem on the subject, and is familiar to everybody. It is not an uncommon picture; yet would it were even more common, and that sunbonnets and torn hats were not going out of fashion:

"Maud Muller, on a summer's day,

Raked the meadow sweet with hay.

'Beneath her torn hat glowed the wealth
Of simple beauty and rustic health."

But haying is hard work, and the men benefit by it only indirectly. Hay is for horses and stock. Yet the men work the hardest in the fields, while the horses merely draw the loads, and wait while the men pitch on the hay or unload it into the mow. It is a case, in this instance, of the servant being greater than his master; but the master generally manages to make up