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sure to bear you several cr<?ps beside the apple. 

 3P of sweet and tender reminiscences dating from child- 

 and spanning the seasons from May to October, and making the 

 orchard a sort of outlying part of the household. You have played there 

 as a child, mused there as a youth or lover, strolled there as a thoughtful, 

 sad-eyed man. Your father, perhaps, planted the trees or reared them 

 from the seed, and you yourself have pruned and grafted them, and 

 worked among them, till every separate tree has a peculiar history and 

 meaning in your mind. Then there is the never-failing crop of birds- 

 robins, goldfinches, king-birds, cedar-birds, hair-birds, orioles, starlings- 

 all nesting and breeding in its branches, and fitly described by Wilson 

 Flagg, as "Birds of the Garden and Orchard." Whether the pippin and 

 sweetbough bear or not, the "punctual birds" can always be depended 

 upon. Indeed, there are few better places to study ornithology than in 

 the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, many of the birds of the 

 deeper forest find occasion to visit it during the season. The cuckoo comes 

 for the tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen apples, the ruffed grouse for 

 buds, the crow foraging for birds' eggs, the woodpecker and chickadees 

 for their food, and the high-hole for ants. The red-bird comes, too, if only 

 to see what a friendly covert its branches form, and the wood-thrush now 

 and then comes out of the grove near by, and nests alongside of its cousin, 

 the robin. The smaller hawks know that this is a most likely spot for 

 their prey, and in the spring the shy northern warblers may be studied 

 as they pause to feed on the fine insects amid its branches. The mice love 

 to dwell here also, and hither come from the near^ woods the squirrel and 

 the rabbit. The latter will put his head through' the boy's slipper-noose 

 any time for a taste of the sweet apple, and th^ red squirrel and chip- 

 munk esteem its seeds a great rarity. 



JOHN BURROUGHS. 



