trained tree look pusillanimously conventional
beside it. I think the perfume of its blossoms is richer and
carries farther and I know the pink of the petals is fairer. The
wild apple is the queen of all pasture trees today and does not
need to bear a tag for the most citified man, the most
boudoir-encysted woman to know it. To get beneath an apple tree,
even in the wildest and most unfrequented portion of the pasture or
woodland, is to all of us like finding one's roof-tree once more.
The race seems to have been brought up beneath it and I take it
for a sign of decadence in the New England character that we no
longer plant orchards. It is fortunate for us all that the wild
creatures are doing what man will not and it may be that their
planting will some day give us so beautiful and well flavored a
wild apple that we too shall be moved to plant and the country
blossom with orchards once more. All the best varieties were thus
seedlings originally and have been perpetuated by transferring
their buds to the limbs of less valued stock.

Just as in man bone and sinew count really for little and it is
only the subtle essence of being, the spirit behind and within,
that matters, so it is the sweet and kindly soul within the apple
tree that radiates love to all comers. In apple-blossom time the
bees will desert all other flowers for them, not because the honey
is sweeter or more plentiful within them but because the wooing
fragrance has more of a pull on their heart strings than any
other. Again in the late autumn they come to the ripe fruit for
final winter stores, drawn by the same subtle essence, distilled
from disintegrating, pulpy cells. I believe the first cider making
was a rude attempt to imprison and perpetuate this charm, rather
than to simply make a spirituous liquor. So richly does the apple
tree give forth this spirit of generous delight that to all of us
the trees seem to brood and radiate a feeling of parental
protection. Man often voices this, and in ancient times there were
ceremonies which recognized the tree as a kindly deity to whom
reverence was done and thanks given. To "wassail" the trees was
more than a jovial excuse for cider and song, it had roots in a
deeper feeling of reverence and gratitude. But those humbler than
men have the same feeling. In the pastures I often find the apple
trees literally brooding seedling cedars which seem to flock
beneath the outstretched and low-hanging boughs as chickens