CHAPTER XI

APPLE-LAND


It was a spacious morning of windswept sunshine, with a wintry bite in
the keen air. Meadow-larks and song-sparrows kept up a faint warbling
about us, but the crickets, which yesterday had here and there made a
thin music, as of straggling bands of survivors of the Summer, were
numbed into silence again. Once or twice we caught sight of the dainty
snipe in the meadows, and high over the woods a bird-hawk floated, as by
some invisible anchorage, in the sky. It was an austere landscape, grave
with elm and ash and pine. For a space, a field of buckwheat standing in
ricks struck a smudged negroid note, but there was warmth in the apple
orchards which clustered about the scattered houses, with piles of golden
pumpkins and red apples under the trees. And is there any form of
piled-up wealth, bins of specie at the bank, or mountains of precious
stones, rubies and sapphires and carbuncles, as we picture them in the
subterranean treasuries of kings, that thrills the imagination with so
dream-like a sense of uncounted riches, untold gold, as such natural
bullion of the earth; pyramids of apples lighting up dark orchards, great
plums lying in heaps of careless purple, corridors hung with fabulous
bunches of grapes, or billowy mounds of yellow grain--the treasuries of
Pomona and Vertumnus? Such treasuries, in the markets of this world, are
worth only a modest so-much-a-bushel, yet I think I should actually feel
myself richer with a barrel of apples than with a barrel of money.