ecially fine
ones for Mr. White's family. He said he liked him, because he was a
real sandy Scotchman, who knew when an apple was right, and wasn't
afraid to say so.

On the south side of the orchard there was the earliest June apple
tree. The apples were small, bright red with yellow stripes, crisp,
juicy and sweet enough to be just right. The tree was very large, and
so heavy it leaned far to the northeast.

This sounds like make-believe, but it's gospel truth. Almost two feet
from the ground there was a big round growth, the size of a hash bowl.
The tree must have been hurt when very small and the place enlarged
with the trunk. Now it made a grand step. If you understood that no
one could keep from running the last few rods from the tree, then
figured on the help to be had from this step, you could see how we went
up it like squirrels. All the bark on the south side was worn away and
the trunk was smooth and shiny. The birds loved to nest among the
branches, and under the peach tree in the fence corner opposite was a
big bed of my mother's favourite wild flowers, blue-eyed Marys. They
had dainty stems from six to eight inches high and delicate heads of
bloom made up of little flowers, two petals up, blue, two turning down,
white. Perhaps you don't know about anything prettier than that.
There were maiden-hair ferns among them too! and the biggest lichens
you ever saw on the fence, while in the hollow of a rotten rail a
little chippy bird always built a hair nest. She got the hairs at our
barn, for most of them were gray from our carriage horses, Ned and Jo.
All down that side of the orchard the fence corners were filled with
long grass and wild flowers, a few alder bushes left to furnish berries
for the birds, and wild roses for us, to keep their beauty impressed on
us, father said.

The east end ran along the brow of a hill so steep we coasted down it
on the big meat board all winter. The board was six inches thick, two
and a half feet wide, and six long. Father said slipping over ice and
snow gave it the good scouring it needed, and it was thick enough to
last all our lives, so we might play with it as we pleased. At least
seven of us could go skimming down that hill and halfway across the
meadow on it. In the very place we slid across, in summer lay the
cowslip bed. The world is full of beautiful spots, but I doubt if any
of them ever were prettier than that. Father called it swale. We
didn't