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 skilful gleaner, you may get many a pocket-
full 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 [Footnote: Robert Curzon was a traveller who
searched for old manuscripts in the monasteries of the Levant. See
his book, Ancient Monasteries of the East.] 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