134 Pomology at the West. 



and again go through the same operation. In this way, 

 without family and without connection, he rambled from 

 place to place, and employed his time, I may say his life. 



When the settlers began to flock in, and open their " clear- 

 ings," old Appleseed was ready for them with his young 

 trees ; and it was not his fault if every one of them had not 

 an orchard planted out and growing without delay. 



Thus he proceeded for many years, deriving a self-satisfac- 

 tion amounting to delight, from the indulgence of his engross- 

 ing passion. 



Such were the labors and such the life of Johnny Apple- 

 seed among us, and such his unmingled enjoyments, till 

 about fifteen years ago, when, probably feeling the encroach- 

 ments of others upon his sphere, and desiring a new and more 

 extended field of operations, he removed to the far West, 

 there to enact over again the same career of humble but 

 sublime usefulness. 



This man, obscure and illiterate though he was, was yet, 

 in some respects, another Dr. Van Mons, and must have 

 been endued with the instinct of his theory. His usual prac- 

 tice was to gather his seeds from seedHng trees, and to take 

 them from as many different seedling trees as were to be 

 found within the range of his yearly autumnal rambles, and 

 from those particular seedling trees affording the highest evi- 

 dence in their fruit that the process of amelioration was 

 begun and was going on in them. At first, his visits necessa- 

 rily extended to the seedling orchards upon the Ohio and 

 Monongahela Rivers in what were called the " settlements;" 

 but when the orchards of his own planting began to bear, 

 his wanderings, for the purpose of collecting seed, became 

 more and more narrowed in their extent, till the time of his 

 departure further westward. 



Still true, however, to the instinct which first drew him to 

 the Van Mons theory for the production of new ameliorated 

 varieties of the apple, he has continued occasionally to re- 

 turn in the autumn to his beloved orchards hereabouts, for 

 the double purpose of contemplating and ruminating upon 

 the results of his labors, and of gathering seeds from his own 

 seedling trees, to take with him and carry on by their means 

 reproduction at the West. Recently, his visits have been alto- 



