fter
eating the apples, not a few signed for them at fifty cents a graft.

It required a fair share of courage on the part of a boy of fifteen to
go to the tree by night, for the distance from Willis's home was fully
two miles; and at that time bears and lynxes frequented the "great
pasture."

Willis afterward told the other boys that a bear came out in the path
directly ahead of him one night, as he was hurrying home with a bushel
of Wild Rose Sweetings on his shoulder. The creature sniffed, and Willis
shouted to frighten it. He was on the point of throwing down his apples,
to climb a tree in haste, when the bear shambled away.

Willis seems now to have had great designs of selling scions to
orchardists and nurserymen over the whole country. Only a tiny twig,
three inches long, is requisite for a scion for grafting into other
trees. The Wild Rose Sweeting tree would produce thousands of such
scions. Willis, who was a Yankee lad by ancestry, resolved to preserve
the secret of the tree at all hazards. He appears to have had dreams of
making a fortune from it.

Thus far no one had been able to find the tree, as much from nature's
own precaution in hiding it as from Willis's craft. By the middle of
September that autumn he had gathered most of the apples, when the same
chance which had first led his steps to the tree revealed it to the eyes
of his enemies.

For about that time Alfred Batchelder and Charles Cross's brother,
Newman, went fishing up the brook, and in due course arrived at the
trout-hole where Willis had sat when he saw the squirrel. They crept up
to the hole, baited and cast in together.

There were no bites immediately; but as they sat there they heard a red
squirrel _chirr_! up among the thick hemlocks, and presently caught the
sound of a low thud on the ground, soon followed by another and another.

"He's gnawing off apples," said Alfred. "There's an apple-tree among
those hemlocks."

Then the two cronies glanced at each other, and the same thought
occurred to both. "Who knows!" exclaimed Newman. "Who knows but what
that may be the tree?"

They stopped fishing and began searching. They could still hear the
squirrel in the apple-tree, and the sounds guided them to the little
dell among the rocks. There were a few apples remaining on the tree; and
they no sooner saw them than they knew that Willis Murch's famous tree
was found at last.

They were so greatly pleased that they hurrahed and whooped