loo B Y- WA YS AND BIRD-NO TES. 



time, but when their season comes round again 

 the zest comes too 



Was it not Adonis, as Shakespeare has it, to 

 whom the birds 



&quot; Would bring mulberries, and ripe red cherries&quot;? 



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 papavvs 

 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 



