loo BY-WAYS AND BIRD-NOTES. 



time, but when their season comes round again 

 the zesft comes too 



Was it not Adonis, as Shakespeare has it, to 

 whom the birds — 



" Would bring mulberries, and ripe red cherries " ? 



To me the flavor of our American wild cher- 

 ries has always been especially alluring. So, 

 too, the service-berries, with their wild red 

 wine, have tempted me to many a dangerous 

 feat of climbing. Often in the dense huckle- 

 berry swamps of the South I have refused to 

 be frightened from my purple feast even by 

 the keen whir of the rattlesnake's tail, though 

 the deadly sound would make my faithful dog 

 desert me in cowardly haste. 



Along the banks of the streams of Georgia 

 and South Carolina grows a grape, known by 

 the musical name of muscadine, which I esteem 

 as altogether the wildest and raciest of all 

 wild fruit. Its juice has the musty taste of 

 old wine along with a strange aromatic quality 

 peculiarly its own. On splendid moonlight 

 nights I have swung in the muscadine vines, 

 slowly feasting on the great purple globes, 

 while the raccoons fought savagely in the trees 

 hard by, and a clear river gently murmured 

 below. Next to the muscadine among wild 

 fruits I rate the papaw as best. It is gen- 

 uinely wild, rich, racy, and, to me, palatable 

 and digestible. I once sent a box of papaws 

 to a great Boston author, whose friendship I 

 chanced to possess, and was much disap- 

 pointed to learn that the musty odor of the 

 fruit was very distasteful to him. He fancied 

 that the papaws were rotten ! I dare say he 

 never tasted them ; and if he had, their flavor 



