When Nuts Are Dropping 
and when the blackbirds in the treetops are holding those 
wonderful conventions of theirs, their jargoning being as 
the creaking of innumerable wagons. 
The ideal day for nut gathering is a windy one after a 
frosty night, and you would better be afoot betimes, or the 
squirrels will have had the pick of the windfalls, for 
windfalls, if you are wise, are what you are after. Club¬ 
bing the trees not only turns your sport into labor, but 
is injurious to the trees and altogether brutal. There is 
hardly any shorter cut back to the youth of the world than 
this scratching for the brown nuts among the fallen leaves 
and green mosses of the woodland floor. Each one found 
whets the appetite for more, until you are prouder of your 
bulging pockets than you were yesterday of a lucky turn on 
the market. 
This year chestnuts, the popular favorite among nuts, 
seem scarce, but the yield of shellbarks is abundant. The 
hickory tribe, of which the Eastern shellbark and the 
pecan of the Mississippi Valley are the most esteemed as 
nut-bearers, are among the most interesting of our native 
trees. America has a monopoly of them, for they do not 
grow in the Old World. The peculiar character of the 
wood is its elastic toughness, which has passed into a pro¬ 
verb. This quality makes the hickory very valuable in 
the manufacture of agricultural implements, while as fuel 
for an open fire it has probably promoted more waking 
dreams and pleasant reveries than any other wood of our 
forests. The Indians, who knew a good deal more about 
some of our native products than we do, found that by 
pounding the nuts, putting them in boiling water and then 
[109] 
