ieties exist in little colonies about the field. When you strike the
outskirts of one of these plantations, how quickly you work toward the
centre of it, and then from the centre out, then circumnavigate it, and
follow up all its branchings and windings!

Then the delight in the abstract and in the concrete of strolling and
lounging about the June meadows; of lying in pickle for half a day or
more in this pastoral sea, laved by the great tide, shone upon by the
virile sun, drenched to the very marrow of your being with the warm and
wooing influences of the young summer!

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. I went forth
adventurously. I could wander free as the wind. Then there were moments
of inspiration, for it always seemed a felicitous stroke to light upon
a particularly fine spot, as it does when one takes an old and wary
trout. You discovered the game where it was hidden. Your genius
prompted you. Another had passed that way and had missed the prize.
Indeed, the successful berry-picker, like Walton's angler, is born, not
made. It is only another kind of angling. In the same field one boy
gets big berries and plenty of them; another wanders up and down, and
finds only a few little ones. He cannot see them; he does not know
how to divine them where they lurk under the leaves and vines. The
berry-grower knows that in the cultivated patch his pickers are very
unequal, the baskets of one boy or girl having so inferior a look
that it does not seem possible they could have been filled from the
same vines with certain others. But neither blunt fingers nor blunt
eyes are hard to find; and as there are those who can see nothing
clearly, so there are those who can touch nothing deftly or gently.

The cultivation of the strawberry is thought to be comparatively
modern. The ancients appear to have been a carnivorous race: they
gorged themselves with meat; while the modern man makes larger and
larger use of fruits and vegetables, until this generation is doubtless
better fed than any that has preceded it. The