milk,--yea, prefer it to any other known dish? I am not thinking of a
dessert of strawberries and cream; this the city boy may have, too,
after a sort; but bread-and-milk, with the addition of wild
strawberries, is peculiarly a country dish, and is to the taste what a
wild bird's song is to the ear. When I was a lad, and went afield with
my hoe or with the cows, during the strawberry season, I was sure to
return at meal-time with a lining of berries in the top of my straw
hat. They were my daily food, and I could taste the liquid and gurgling
notes of the bobolink in every spoonful of them; and to this day, to
make a dinner or supper off a bowl of milk with bread and
strawberries,--plenty of strawberries,--well, is as near to being a boy
again as I ever expect to come. The golden age draws sensibly near.
Appetite becomes a kind of delicious thirst,--a gentle and subtle
craving of all parts of the mouth and throat,--and those nerves of
taste that occupy, as it were, a back seat, and take little cognizance
of grosser foods, come forth, and are played upon and set vibrating.
Indeed, I think, if there is ever rejoicing throughout one's alimentary
household,--if ever that much-abused servant, the stomach, says Amen,
or those faithful handmaidens, the liver and spleen, nudge each other
delightedly, it must be when one on a torrid summer day passes by the
solid and carnal dinner for this simple Arcadian dish.

The wild strawberry, like the wild apple, is spicy and high-flavored,
but, unlike the apple, it is also mild and delicious. It has the true
rustic sweetness and piquancy. What it lacks in size, when compared
with the garden berry, it makes up in intensity. It is never dropsical
or overgrown, but firm-fleshed and hardy. Its great enemies are the
plow, gypsum, and the horse-rake. It dislikes a limestone soil, but
seems to prefer the detritus of the stratified rock. Where the sugar
maple abounds, I have always found plenty of wild strawberries. We have