ON THE HICKORY NUT 
home, and I early learned to distinguish the great 
difference in the products of the trees, all of which, 
of course, were natural seedlings. 
Among hundreds of trees there would be 
scarcely two that bore nuts of precisely the same 
appearance and quality. 
Some of these hickory nuts were long and 
slender, with prominent ridges; some were short 
and compact and smooth in contour; some were 
very flat and others were nearly globular. The 
shell varied correspondingly in thickness, and the 
meat varied greatly in whiteness and in flavor. 
As a boy I knew very well which trees to seek 
in the fall in order to secure nuts that were plump 
and thin-shelled, with sweet and delicious meats. 
It was only after the crop of these trees had been 
gathered that inferior ones gained attention. 
I knew very well, also, that different trees 
varied greatly in productiveness, some bearing 
nuts so abundantly each year that the ground was 
literally covered when the nuts fell. Others pro- 
duced nuts very sparingly. 
The trees that thus varied as to their fruit, 
varied also in form, in size, and in rapidity of 
growth. In a word, the wild hickories represented 
numerous varieties that a boy could differentiate, 
whether or not a botanist might choose to classify 
them as members of the same species. 
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