DANVIS FARM LIFE 85 



them a name, are plucked with the care befitting 

 their honored rank and stored for winter use or 

 market, while their plebeian kindred, the "com- 

 mon" or "natural" apples, are unceremoniously 

 beaten with poles or shaken from their scraggy, 

 untrimmed boughs and tumbled into the box of the 

 farm-wagon to go lumbering off to the cider-mill. 

 This, after its ten or eleven months of musty emp- 

 tiness and idleness, has now awakened to a short 

 season of bustle, of grinding and pressing and full- 

 ness of casks and heaped bins and the fragrance 

 thereof. Wagons are unloading their freight of 

 apples and empty barrels, and departing with full 

 casks after the driver has tested the flavor and 

 strength of the earliest-made cider. And now at 

 the cellar hatchway of the farmhouse, the boy 

 and the new-come cider-barrel may be found in 

 conjunction with a rye straw for the connecting 

 link. 



The traveling thresher begins to make the round 

 of the farms and establishes his machine on the 

 barn floor, whence belch forth, with resounding 

 din, clouds of dust in which are seen dimly the 

 forms of the workmen and the laboring horses 

 climbing an unstable hill whose top they never 

 reach. Out of the dust-cloud grows a stack of yel- 

 low straw alongside the gray barn, which it almost 

 rivals in height and breadth when the threshing 

 is ended. 



