244 DAYS OUT OF DOORS. 



and the living-room of the old stone house replaced the 

 garden site, while I stood amid the weeds, holding a bit of 

 broken glass ! 



The quince proved better as a nosegay than as fruit to 

 eat. It was hard beyond safe mastication, but the fra- 

 grance was delicious. How sadly changed the fruit of 

 that tree during the long years of its abandonment ! 

 Plump as the finest apple of them all, as deep a yellow as 

 the orange itself, with what care the fruit was once gath- 

 ered and prepared for winter use ! A dainty that set well 

 with venison, bear-steak, and pheasants ; for the Bishops 

 loved good living then, nor accounted a well-appointed 

 feast one of life's vanities. Quince jelly was their boast, 

 and it was with pride, however they might have denied it, 

 that they saw the jelly stand alone as they emptied the 

 cracked cups that held it. Sugar was a luxury then, and 

 this secret of their jelly-making died with the thrifty 

 Quakers of early colonial times. 



And that apple ! it certainly came from a compara- 

 tively young tree ; for there be none that have weathered 

 the storms of well-nigh two centuries. I say compara- 

 tively young ; the tree had been large, and was now but 

 the merest ghost of its former self ; perhaps it was a cent- 

 ury ago that the seed was planted ; dropped from a core 

 thrown down by one of the fair Jane Bishop's children, 

 it may be. The tree stood too near the " pebble-edged " 

 path, I think, to have been intentionally planted. 



Apple orchards were one of the features of Indian 

 farming about here, and the juice of the fruit was no 

 novelty to the earliest English settlers. Thrifty old Mah- 

 lon Stacy wrote from near here, in 1680 : " I have seen 

 orchards laden with fruit to admiration, their very limbs 

 torn to pieces with the weight, and most delicious to the 

 taste, and lovely to behold. I have seen an apple tree 

 from a pippin-kernel yield a barrel of curious cyder." He 



