never being without it; and there was some trick of her hand or a
secret ingredient which was withheld when she responded with apparent
cheerfulness to requests for its recipe. As for the apples, they were
grown upon an old tree, one of whose limbs had been grafted with some
unknown variety of fruit so long ago that the history was forgotten;
only that an English gardener, many years before, had brought some
cuttings from the old country, and one of them had somehow come into
the possession of John Thacher's grandfather when grafted fruit was a
thing to be treasured and jealously guarded. It had been told that
when the elder Thacher had given away cuttings he had always stolen to
the orchards in the night afterward and ruined them. However, when the
family had grown more generous in later years it had seemed to be
without avail, for, on their neighbors' trees or their own, the
English apples had proved worthless. Whether it were some favoring
quality in that spot of soil or in the sturdy old native tree itself,
the rich golden apples had grown there, year after year, in
perfection, but nowhere else.

"There ain't no such apples as these, to my mind," said Mrs. Martin,
as she polished a large one with her apron and held it up to the
light, and Mrs. Jake murmured assent, having already taken a
sufficient first bite.

"There's only one little bough that bears any great," said Mrs.
Thacher, "but it's come to that once before, and another branch has
shot up and been likely as if it was a young tree."

The good souls sat comfortably in their splint-bottomed,
straight-backed chairs, and enjoyed this mild attempt at a festival.
Mrs. Thacher even grew cheerful and responsive, for her guests seemed