STRAWBERRIES. 69 



these berries in a bowl of rich milk with some bread, 



ah, what a dish, too good to set before a king ! 

 I suspect this was the food of Adam in Paradise, 

 only Adam did not have the Wilson strawberry ; he 

 had the wild strawberry that Eve plucked in their 

 hill-meadow and " hulled " with her own hands, and 

 that, take it all in all, even surpasses the late ripened 

 Wilson. 



Adam is still extant in the taste and appetite of 

 most country boys ; lives there a country boy who 

 does not like wild strawberries-and-milk, yea, pre- 

 fers 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 at this day, to make a dinner or sup- 

 per 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 



