far they will go. It is not strange, then, that dandelions spring up almost everywhere. See what a vast number of fruits must go sailing about all over the country on a dry midsummer's day. Not half of them grow up into plants to make more dandelions, it is true, but a great many of them do.

In the same way the beautiful asters of our woods, with their flowers of yellow or purplish disks and lovely rays of white or purple as large as roses, let their little fruits fly away from their heads as soon as ripe and dry.

7. There are about as many different kinds of fruits as there are flowers. The plants of the bean family, for instance, have fruits like the bean pods. These pods, when ripe and dry, split open at the two edges, when the beans or seeds drop out. Do you know the pods of the honeylocust trees, large, broad, thin, and sweet? Clover belongs to the bean family. You can find the tiny pods in the dry heads of clover, if you will pick out the little withered flowers and open them.

8. Some fruits have a kind of wings. Such are the fruits of our beautiful maple or sugar trees; and very pretty are these maple keys, as they are called, as they hang in clusters from the branches and dangle among the leaves. At the end where they are joined there is in each key a thick, hard, round swelling, in which is the seed. When the fruit is ripe and dry it falls off, and we may often see the pair of keys flying away together. As they are light, they go whirling in the wind, sometimes to a great distance. The fruit of the ash-trees looks like that of the maple, and also hangs in bunches; but each fruit is a single key.

9. These are but a few of the many kinds of fruits to

be found on plants, each in itself a curiosity and a beauty; and how much we fairly owe to them is scarcely ever in our thoughts. If we consider but wheat alone, how valuable to us is its little fruit, the simple grain; to say nothing of the fruits of other grasses, such as rice, rye, oats, and the large and generous ears of Indian-corn.

10. Nor must the cotton-plant be forgotten, whose fruit does not indeed feed, but clothes our bodies, enters into countless uses in every household, is indispensable on every craft that sails the sea, and inseparable from so many industries on land and water. The fruit of the cotton-plant is a pod, which, bursting open, reveals a mass of white woolly fibres enveloping and clinging to the seeds. This is the beautiful and useful cotton.

1. ON the threshold of summer, nature proffers us this, her virgin fruit. More rich and sumptuous are to follow, but the wild delicacy and fillip of the strawberry are never repeated, that keen feathered edge greets the tongue in nothing else.

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2. We may well celebrate it with festivals and music. It has that indescribable quality of all first things, shy, uncloying, provoking barbed sweetness. It is born of the copious dews, the fragrant nights, the tender skies, the plentiful rains of the early season. It is the product of

liquid May touched by the June sun. It has the tartness, the briskness, the unruliness of spring, and the aroma and intensity of summer.

3. What a challenge it is to the taste! how it bites back again! and is there any other sound like the snap and crackle with which it salutes the ear on being plucked from the stems? It is a threat to one sense that the other is soon to verify. It snaps to the ear as it smacks to the tongue. All other berries are tame beside it.

4. Is there anything like the odor of strawberries? The next best thing to tasting them is to smell them. Last fall I potted some of the Downer, and in the winter grew them in the house. In March the berries were ripe, only four or five on a plant, just enough, all told, to make one consider whether it was not worth while to kill off the rest of the household so that the berries need not be divided. But if every tongue could not have a feast, every nose banqueted daily upon them. They filled the house with perfume.

5. The Downer is remarkable in this respect. Grown in the open field, it surpasses in its odor any strawberry of my acquaintance. And it is scarcely less agreeable to the taste. It is a very beautiful berry to look upon, round, light pink, with a delicate, fine-grained expression. Some berries shine, the Downer glows as if there were a red bloom upon it. Its core is firm and white, its skin thin and easily bruised, which makes it a poor market berry, but, with its high flavor and productiveness, an admirable one for home use. It seems to be as easily grown as the Wilson, while it is much more palatable.

6. The great trouble with the Wilson, as everybody knows, is its rank acidity. When it first comes, it is diffi

cult to eat it without making faces. But wait till toward the end of the season, after the plant gets over its hurry and takes time to ripen its fruit. Out of its crabbedness and spitefulness come the finest, choicest flavors.

It is an astonishing berry. It lays hold of the taste in a way that the aristocratic berries, like the Jecunda or Triumph, cannot approximate to. A quart of these rareripes I venture to say contains more of the peculiar virtue and excellence of the strawberry kind than can be had in twice the same quantity of any other cultivated variety.

7. Take these berries in a bowl of rich milk with some bread, ah, what a dish, - too good to set before a king! I suspect this was the food of Adam in Paradise, only Adam did not have the Wilson strawberry; he had the wild strawberry that Eve plucked in their hill-meadow and "hulled" with her own hands; and that, take it all in all, even surpasses the late-ripened Wilson.

8. When I was a lad, and went afield with my hoe or with the cows, during the strawberry season, I was sure to return at meal-time with a lining of berries in the top of my straw hat. They were my daily food, and I could taste the liquid and gurgling notes of the bobolink in every spoonful of them; and at this day to make a dinner or supper off a bowl of milk with bread and strawberries, plenty of strawberries, well, is as near to being a boy

again as I ever expect to come.

Indeed, I think, if ever that much-abused servant, the stomach, says Amen, or those faithful handmaidens, the liver and spleen, nudge each other delightedly, it must be when one on a torrid summer day passes by the solid and carnal dinner for this simple Arcadian dish.

9. The wild strawberry, like the wild apple, is spicy and high-flavored, but, unlike the apple, it is also mild and delicious. It has the true rustic sweetness and piquancy. What it lacks in size, when compared with the garden berry, it makes up in intensity.

The favorite haunt of the wild strawberry is an up-lying meadow that has been exempt from the plow for five or six years, and that has little timothy and much daisy. When you go a-berrying turn your steps toward the milkwhite meadows. The slightly bitter odor of the daisies is very agreeable to the smell, and affords a good background for the perfume of the fruit.

10. I was a famous berry-picker when a boy. It was near enough to hunting and fishing to enlist me. Mother would always send me in preference to any of the rest of the boys. I got the biggest berries and the most of them. There was something of the excitement of the chase in the occupation, and something of the charm and preciousness of game about the trophies. The pursuit had its surprises, its expectancies, its sudden disclosures, in fact, its uncertainties. It is only another kind of angling.

11. The strawberry is always the hope of the invalid, and sometimes, no doubt, his salvation. It is the first and finest relish among fruits, and well merits Dr. Boteler's memorable saying, that "doubtless God might have made a better berry than the strawberry, but doubtless God never did."

JOHN BORROUGHS.