THE APPLE 125 



fruit till the grass beneath them has become thick and 

 soft from human contact, and who have nourislied 

 robins and finches in their brandies till they have a 

 tender, brooding look ! The ground, the turf, the 

 atmosphere of an old orchard, seem several stages 

 nearer to man than that of the adjoining field, as if 

 the trees had given back to the soil more than they 

 had taken from it ; as if they had tempered the ele- 

 ments, and attracted all the genial and beneficent 

 influences in the landscape around. 



An apple orchard is sure to bear you several 

 crops beside the apple. There is the crop of sweet 

 and tender reminiscences, dating from childhood 

 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 tliem, 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, kingbirds, cedar-birds, hairbirds, ori- 

 oles, 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 sweet bough bear or not, the "punctual 

 birds " can always be depended on. Indeed, there 

 are few better places to study ornithology than in 

 the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, many of 



