e woods were most enticing. Squirrels, black and gray,
were still abundant where the oak and hickory were; the ruffled grouse
still fed in families upon beech-nuts on the ridges and the thorn-apples
of the lowlands. The wild turkey still strutted about in flocks rapidly
thinning, and occasionally a deer fell to the lot of the shrewd hunter.
John liked to hunt and fish. He wasted time that way, his neighbors
said, and his wife was of the same opinion. It is true, he possessed
certain qualities which, even in their utilitarian eyes, commanded some
slight respect. He was so close to nature in his thoughts and fancies
that he knew many things which they did not, and which had a money
value. It was he, for instance, who first recognized the superior
quality of the White Neshannock, the potato of the time. It was he who
grafted the Baldwin upon his apple-trees, recognizing the fact that this
particular apple was a toothsome and marketable and relatively
non-decaying fruit. And it was he who could judge best as to what
crosses and combinations would most improve the breed of horses and
cattle and hogs and sheep. They admitted his "faculty," as they called
it, in certain directions, but they had a profound contempt for him in
others. They could not understand why he would leave standing in the
midst of a wheat-field a magnificent soft maple, the branches of which
shaded and made untillable an area of scores of yards. They could not
understand why he hesitated to murder a tree. So it came that he was
with them while scarcely of them, and that Mrs. Appleman, who could not
comprehend, belonged to the majority.

It must not be understood that John Appleman was unpopular. On the
contrary, each sturdy farmer rather liked while he criticised him. Had
John run for township clerk, or possibly even for supervisor, that most
important of township honors throughout Michigan, he might have been
elected, but John did not know his strength. He recognized his own
weakness, after a fashion. He knew that he would work violently for a
month or two at a time, giving the vigorous hired man a decent test in
holding his physical own, and he knew that after that he would become
what the people called "slack," and a little listless; and it was in his
slack times that the squirrel and grouse most suffered. Between him and
the wife of his bosom had grown nothing, so grave as to be described as
an armed neutrality; but more and more he hesitated in enterin