me
to be a vast undertaking.

"I do," replied Addison, hopefully. "Father meant for me to go to
college, and I mean to go, even if I get to be twenty before I am fitted
to enter. I will not grow up an ignoramus. A man without education is a
nobody nowadays. But with a good education, a man can do almost
anything."

"Halse doesn't talk that way," said I.

"I presume to say he doesn't," replied Addison. "He and I do not think
alike."

"But Theodora says that she means to go to school and study a great
deal, so as to do something which she has in mind, one of these days," I
went on to say. "Do you know what it is?"

"Cannot say that I do," Addison replied, rather indifferently, as I
thought.

"Oh, I suppose it is a good thing for girls to study and get educated,"
Addison continued. "But I do not think it amounts to so much for them as
it does for boys."

This, indeed, was an opinion far more common in 1866 than at the present
time.

"Perhaps it is to be a teacher?" I conjectured.

"Maybe," said Addison.

But I was thinking of apple-hoards. There was a delightful proprietary
sense in the idea of owning one. It stimulated some latent propensity
to secretiveness, as also the inclination to play the freebooter in a
small way.

This was the first time that I had ever had access to an orchard of
ripening fruit, and those "early trees" are well fixed in my youthful
recollections. Several of them stood immediately below the garden, along
the upper side of the orchard. First there was the "August Pippin" tree,
a great crotched tree, with a trunk as large round as a barrel. Somehow
such trees do not grow nowadays.

The August Pippins began to ripen early in August. These apples were as
large as a teacup, bright canary yellow in color, mellow, a trifle tart,
and wonderfully fragrant. When the wind was right, I could smell those
pippins over in the corn-field, fifty rods distant from the orchard. I
even used to think that I could tell by the smell when an apple had
dropped off from the tree!

Then there were the "August Sweets," which grew on four grafts, set into
an old "drying apple" tree. They were pale yellow apples, larger even
than the August Pippins, sweet, juicy and mellow. The old people called
them "Pear Sweets."

Next were the "Sour Harvey," the "Sweet Harvey," and the "Mealy Sweet"
trees. The "Mealy Sweet" was not of much account; it was too dry, but
the Harveys were excellent. Some of the Sweet Harve