He offers an apple to his companion, and takes one himself. They are his chief solace when on the road. He sows their seed all along the route. He tosses the core from the car window and from the top of the stage-coach. He would, in time, make the land one vast orchard. He dispenses with a knife. He prefers that his teeth shall have the first taste. Then he knows the best flavor is immediately beneath the skin, and that in a pared apple this is lost. If you will stew the apple, he says, instead of baking it, by all means leave the skin on. It improves the color and vastly heightens the flavor of the dish.

9. How the early settlers prized the apple! When their trees broke down or were split asunder by the storms, the neighbors turned out, the divided tree was put together again and fastened with iron bolts. In some of the oldest orchards one may still occasionally see a large dilapidated tree with the rusty iron bolt yet visible. Poor, sour fruit, too, but sweet in those early pioneer days.

10. Emerson, I believe, has spoken of the apple as the social fruit of New England. Indeed, what a promoter or abettor of social intercourse among our rural population the apple has been, - the company growing more merry and unrestrained as soon as the basket of apples was passed round. When the cider followed, the introduction and good understanding were complete.

11. Ours is eminently a country of the orchard. Horace Greeley said he had seen no land in which the orchard formed such a prominent feature in the rural and agricultural districts. Nearly every farmhouse in the Eastern and Northern States has its setting or its background of apple-trees, which generally date back to the first settlement of the farm. Indeed, the orchard, more than almost

any other thing, tends to soften and humanize the country, and give the place of which it is an adjunct a settled, domestic look.

12. Thoreau's chapter on Wild Apples is a most delicious piece of writing. It has a "tang and smack" like the fruit it celebrates, and is dashed and streaked with color in the same manner. It has the hue and perfume of the crab, and the richness and raciness of the pippin. But Thoreau loved other apples than the wild sorts, and was obliged to confess that his favorites could not be eaten in doors.

13. Late in November he found a blue-pearmain tree growing within the edge of a swamp, almost as good as wild. "You would not suppose," he says, "that there was any fruit left there on the first survey, but you must look according to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes I explore amid the bare alders, and the huckleberry bushes, and the withered sedge, and in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under the fallen and decayed ferns which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen into hollows long since, and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself - a proper kind of packing.

14. "From these lurking places, everywhere within the circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit all wet and glossy, may be nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, and perhaps a leaf or two cemented to it, but still with a rich bloom on it, and at least as ripe and well kept, if no better, than those in barrels, more crisp and lively than they.

15. If these resources fail to yield anything, I have learned to look between the leaves of the suckers which spring thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and then one lodges there, or in the very midst of an alder clump, where they are covered by leaves, safe from cows which may have smelled them out. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the blue-pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps, in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance."

JOHN BORROUGHS.

26.

APPLES IN THE CELLAR.

THAT is a barrel of russets;

But we can hardly discuss its

Spheres of frost and flint,

Till, smitten by thoughts of spring,
And the old tree blossoming,
Their bronze takes a yellower tint,
And the pulp grows mellower in 't.
But oh! when they 're sick with the savors
Of sweets that they dream of,
Sure, all the toothsomest flavors
They hold the cream of!

You will be begging in May

For a peck of the apples in gray.

Those are the pearmains, I think, –

Bland and insipid as eggs;

They were too lazy to drink
The light to its dregs,

Those are the Rhode Island greenings,
Excellent apples for pies;
There are no mystical meanings

In fruit of that color and size :
They are too coarse and too juiceful;
They are too large and too useful.

There are the Baldwins and Flyers,
Wrapped in their beautiful fires;
Color forks up from their stems,
As if painted by Flora,

Or as out from the pole stream the flames
Of the northern aurora.

Here shall our quest have a close:
Fill up your basket with those;
Bite through their vesture of flame,
And then you will gather

All that is meant by the name,
"Seek-no-farther."

J. G. HOLLAND.

27. THE GRASS FAMILY.

al'ti-tude, height.

in-dig'e-nous, originating in a certain place or country.

pan'i-cle, a form of inflorescence, in which the cluster is much and irregularly branched.

1. How many of us, when we partake of bread, ever give ourselves a thought about what kind of plant we are

eating. We know that bread is made of flour, and that wheat is grown by the farmer; but how many of us know that the wheat plant is a grass, and that the wheat itself is the fruit of that grass? If not to all mankind, certainly to the Caucasian race, bread is the most important article of food.

2. The most numerous and respectable members of the great grass family are those which bear the name of wheat. There are an immense number of different sorts, and we know them best as summer and winter wheats. To what part of the earth these valuable grasses are indigenous will probably never be known. There is reason to believe, however, that Tartary and Persia are the native countries of wheat, oats, and rye. Winter cold does not affect the wheat, for that sown in spring escapes it, and that sown in autumn is protected by a covering of snow. Wheat keeps a respectful distance of twenty degrees from the equator; but on the elevations in warm climates it is successfully grown, as on the elevations near Quito, almost directly under the equator. And on the north side of the Himalaya mountains wheat and barley flourish at an altitude of thirteen thousand feet.

3. The rye branch of the grass family is very much like wheat in appearance and in habit, and is extensively cultivated in temperate and cold countries. In Russia, Germany, and parts of France, rye is in great request; and one-third of the population of Europe look to its help for daily bread. In this country rye is also largely cultivated and consumed.

4. Oats, a grass whose fruit is not closely set in dense spikes, as are wheat and rye, but in loose and open panicles, flourishes as far north as Norway and Sweden. In some