100 BY-WAYVS AND BIRD-NOTES. 
time, but when their season comes round again 
the zest comes too 
Was it not Adonis, as Shakespeare has it, to 
whom the birds— 
“ Wouid bring mulberries, and ripe red cherries’’? 
To me the flavor of our American wild cher- 
ries has always been especially alluring. So, 
too, the service-berries, with their wild red 
wine, have tempted me to many a dangerous 
feat of climbing. Often in the dense huckle- 
berry swamps of the South I have refused to 
be frightened from my purple feast even by 
the keen whir of the rattlesnake’s tail, though 
the deadly sound would make my faithful dog 
desert me in cowardly haste. 
Along the banks of the streams of Georgia 
and South Carolina grows a grape, known by 
the musical name of muscadine, which I esteem 
as altogether the wildest and raciest of all 
wild fruit. Its juice has the musty taste of 
old wine along with a strange aromatic quality 
peculiarly its own. On splendid moonlight 
nights I have swung in the muscadine vines, 
slowly feasting on the great purple globes, 
while the raccoons fought savagely in the trees 
hard by, and a clear river gently murmured 
below. Next to the muscadine among wild 
fruits I rate the papaw as best. It is gen- 
uinely wild, rich, racy, and, to me, palatable 
and digestible. I once sent a box of papaws 
to a great Boston author, whose friendship I 
chanced to possess, and was much disap- 
pointed to learn that the musty odor of the 
fruit was very distasteful to him. He fancied 
that the papaws were rotten! I dare say he 
never tasted them ; and if he had, their flavor 
