are
gathered late in Autumn, being ripe about that time, and are thrown
into a kettle or pot full of boiling water; by this means their fat
melts out, floats at the top of the water, and may be skimmed off
into a vessel; with the skimming they go on till there is no tallow
left. The tallow, as soon as it is congealed, looks like common
tallow or wax, but has a dirty green color. By being melted over
and refined it acquires a fine and transparent green color. This
tallow is dearer than common tallow, but cheaper than wax. Candles
of this do not easily bend, nor melt in summer as common candles
do; they burn better and slower, nor do they cause any smoke, but
yield rather an agreeable smell when they are extinguished. In
Carolina they not only make candles out of the wax of the berries,
but likewise sealing-wax."

Beverley, the historian of Virginia, wrote of the smell of burning
bayberry tallow:--

"If an accident puts a candle out, it yields a pleasant fragrancy
to all that are in the room; insomuch that nice people often put
them out on purpose to have the incense of the expiring snuff."

Bayberry wax was not only a useful home-product, but an article of
traffic till this century, and was constantly advertised in the
newspapers. In 1712, in a letter written to John Winthrop, F.R.S., I
find:--

"I am now to beg one favour of you,--that you secure for me all the
bayberry wax you can possibly put your hands on. You must take a
care they do not put too much tallow among it, being a custom and
cheat they have got."

Bayberries were of enough importance to have some laws made about them.
Everywhere on Long Island grew the stunted bushes, and everywhere they
were valued. The town of Brookhaven, in 1687, forbade the gathering of
the berries before September 15, under penalty of fifteen shillings'
fine.

The pungent and unique scent of the bayberry, equally strong in leaf
and berry, is to me one of the elements of the purity and sweetness of
the air of our New England coast fields in autumn. It grows everywhere,
green and cheerful, in sun-withered shore pastures, in poor bits of
earth on our rocky coast, where it has few fellow field-tenants to crowd
the ground. It is said that the highest efforts of memory are stimulated
through our sense of smell, by the association of ideas with scents.
That of bayberry, whenever I pas