fruit as it was
culled by the wind.

And there were patriarchal apricot trees that bore their great age
quite bravely. Though decayed on one side, where they showed a perfect
scaffolding of dead wood, they were so youthful, so full of life, that,
on the other, young shoots were ever bursting through their rough bark.
There were cherry trees, that formed complete towns with houses of
several stories, that threw out staircases and floors of branches, big
enough for half a score of families. Then there were the apple trees,
with their limbs twisted like old cripples, with bark gnarled and
knotted, and all stained with lichen-growth. There were also smooth pear
trees, that shot up mast-like with long slender spars. And there were
rosy-blossomed peach-trees that won a place amid this teeming growth as
pretty maids do amidst a human crowd by dint of bright smiles and gentle
persistence. Some had been formerly trained as espaliers, but they had
broken down the low walls which had once supported them, and now spread
abroad in wild confusion, freed from the trammels of trellis work,
broken fragments of which still adhered to some of their branches. They
grew just as they listed, and resembled well-bred trees, once neat and
prim, which, having gone astray, now flaunted but vestiges of whilom
respectability. And from tree to tree, and from bough to bough, vine
branches hung in confusion. They rose like wild laughter, twined for
an instant round some lofty knot, then started off again with yet more
sonorous mirth, splotching all the foliage with the merry ebriety of
their tendrils. Their pale sun-gilt green set a glow of bacchanalianism
about the weather-worn heads of the old orchard giants.

Then towards the left were trees less thickly planted. Thin-foliaged
almonds allowed the sun's rays to pass and ripen the pumpkins, which
looked like moons that had fallen to the earth. Near the edge of a
stream which flowed through the orchard there also grew various kinds of
melons, some rough with knotty warts, some smooth and shining, as oval
as the eggs of ostriches. At every step, too, progress was barred by
currant bushes, showing limpid bunches of fruit, rubies in one and all
of which there sparkled liquid sunlight. And hedges of raspberry
canes shot up like wild brambles, while the ground was but a carpet
of strawberry plants, teeming with ripe berries which exhaled a slight
odour of vanilla.

But the enchanted corner of the orchar