k. He frequently
started from home by two or three o'clock in the morning, and at one
time both he and his horse were much frightened by the screaming of
panthers in a narrow pass in the mountains through which the road led.

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. Then those rural gatherings that enlivened the autumn in the
country, known as "apple cuts," now, alas! nearly obsolete, where so
many things were cut and dried besides apples! The larger and more
loaded the orchard, the more frequently the invitations went round and
the higher the social and convivial spirit ran. 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 to give the place of which it is an adjunct, a settled,
domestic look. The apple-tree takes the rawness and wildness off any
scene. On the top of a mountain, or in remote pastures, it sheds the
sentiment of home. It never loses its domestic air, or lapses into a
wild state. And in planting a homestead, or in choosing a building
site for the new house, what a help it is to have a few old, maternal
apple-trees near by; regular old grandmothers, who have seen trouble,
who have been sad and glad through so many winters and summers, who have
blossomed till the air about them is sweeter than elsewhere, and borne
fruit till the grass beneath them has become thick and soft from human
contact, and who have nourished robins and finches in their branches
till they have a tender, brooding look. The ground, the turf, the
atmosphere of an old orchard, seem several stages nearer to man than
that of the adjoining field, as if the trees had given back to the soil
more than they had taken from it; as if they had tempered the elements
and attracted all the genial and beneficent influences in the landscape
aroun