other for his
good service.

The next morning we set out early to our young plantation of
fruit-trees, to fix props to support the weaker plants. We loaded the
cart with the thick bamboo canes and our tools, and harnessed the cow to
it, leaving the buffalo in the stable, as I wished the wound in his
nostrils to be perfectly healed before I put him to any hard work. I
left Francis with his mother, to prepare our dinner, begging them not to
forget the maccaroni.

We began at the entrance of the avenue to Falcon's Nest, where all the
trees were much bent by the wind. We raised them gently by a crowbar; I
made a hole in the earth, in which one of my sons placed the bamboo
props, driving them firmly down with a mallet, and we proceeded to
another, while Ernest and Jack tied the trees to them with a long,
tough, pliant plant, which I suspected was a species of _llana_. As we
were working, Fritz inquired if these fruit-trees were wild.

"A pretty question!" cried Jack. "Do you think that trees are tamed like
eagles or buffaloes? You perhaps could teach them to bow politely, so
that we might gather the fruit!"

"You fancy you are a wit," said I, "but you speak like a dunce. We
cannot make trees bow at our pleasure; but we can make a tree, which by
nature bears sour and uneatable fruit, produce what is sweet and
wholesome. This is effected by grafting into a wild tree a small branch,
or even a bud, of the sort you wish. I will show you this method
practically at some future time, for by these means we can procure all
sorts of fruit; only we must remember, that we can only graft a tree
with one of the same natural family; thus, we could not graft an apple
on a cherry-tree, for one belongs to the apple tribe, and the other to
the plum tribe."

"Do we know the origin of all these European fruits?" asked the
inquiring Ernest.

"All our shell fruits," answered I, "such as the nut, the almond, and
the chesnut, are natives of the East; the peach, of Persia; the orange
and apricot, of Armenia; the cherry, which was unknown in Europe sixty
years before Christ, was brought by the proconsul Lucullus from the
southern shores of the Euxine; the olives come from Palestine. The first
olive-trees were planted on Mount Olympus, and from thence were spread
through the rest of Europe; the fig is from Lydia; the plums, your
favourite fruit, with the exception of some natural sorts that are
natives of our forests, are from Syria, and the tow