d.

An apple orchard is sure to bear you several crops beside the apple.
There is the crop of sweet and tender reminiscences dating from
childhood and spanning the seasons from May to October, and making the
orchard a sort of outlying part of the household. You have played
there as a child, mused there as a youth or lover, strolled there as a
thoughtful, sad-eyed man. Your father, perhaps, planted the trees, or
reared them from the seed, and you yourself have pruned and grafted
them, and worked among them, till every separate tree has a peculiar
history and meaning in your mind. Then there is the never-failing crop
of birds--robins, goldfinches, king-birds, cedar-birds, hair-birds,
orioles, starlings--all nesting and breeding in its branches, and fitly
described by Wilson Flagg as "Birds of the Garden and Orchard." Whether
the pippin and sweetbough bear or not, the "punctual birds" can always
be depended on. Indeed, there are few better places to study ornithology
than in the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, many of the birds
of the deeper forest find occasion to visit it during the season. The
cuckoo comes for the tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen apples,
the ruffed grouse for buds, the crow foraging for birds' eggs, the
woodpecker and chickadees for their food, and the high-hole for ants.
The red-bird comes too, if only to see what a friendly covert its
branches form; and the wood-thrush now and then comes out of the grove
near by, and nests alongside of its cousin, the robin. The smaller hawks
know that this is a most likely spot for their prey; and in spring the
shy northern warblers may be studied as they pause to feed on the fine
insects amid its branches. The mice love to dwell here also, and hither
comes from the near woods the squirrel and the rabbit. The latter will
put his head through the boy's slipper-noose any time for taste of the
sweet apple, and the red squirrel and chipmunk esteem its seeds a great
rarity.

All the domestic animals love the apple, but none so much so as the cow.
The taste of it wakes her up as few other things do, and bars and fences
must be well looked after. No need to assort them or pick out the ripe
ones for her. An apple is an apple, and there is no best about it. I
heard of a quick-witted old cow that learned to shake them down from
the tree. While rubbing herself she had observed that an apple sometimes
fell. This stimulated her to rub a little harder, when more apple