f a slowly moving landscape with people and birds and
beasts of burden and windy vegetation, of prospects in which there are
no broad smooth farm fields with fences dividing them, of scenery full
of herbage, in which every lineament and action incite me and
stimulate my desire for more, of days that end suddenly in the
blackness of night.

Yet, somehow, I look forward to the time when I may go to a more
accustomed place. Either from long association with other scenes or
because of some inexpressible deficiency in this tropic splendor, I am
not satisfied even though I am exuberantly entertained. Something I
miss. For weeks I wondered what single element I missed most. Out of
the numberless associations of childhood and youth and eager manhood
it is difficult to choose one that is missed more than another. Yet
one day it came over me startlingly that I missed the apple-tree,--the
apple-tree, the sheep, and the milch cattle!

The farm home with its commodious house, its greensward, its great
barn and soft fields and distant woods, and the apple-tree by the
wood-shed; the good home at the end of the village with its sward and
shrubbery, and apple roof-tree; the orchard, well kept, trim and
apple-green, yielding its wagon-loads of fruits; the old tree on the
hillside, in the pasture where generations of men have come and gone
and where houses have fallen to decay; the odor of the apples in the
cellar in the cold winter night; the feasts around the fireside,--I
think all these pictures conjure themselves in my mind to tantalize me
of home.

And often in my wanderings I promise myself that when I reach home I
shall see the apple-tree as I had never seen it before. Even its bark
and its gnarly trunk will hold converse with me, and its first tiny
leaves of the budding spring will herald me a welcome. Once again I
shall be a youth with the apple-tree, but feeling more than the
turbulent affection of transient youth can understand. Life does not
seem regular and established when there is no apple-tree in the yard
and about the buildings, no orchards blooming in the May and laden in
the September, no baskets heaped with the crisp smooth fruits; without
all these I am still a foreigner, sojourning in a strange land.

II

THE APPLE-TREE IN THE LANDSCAPE

The April sun is soft on the broad open fenced fields, waking them
gently from the long deep sleep of winter. Little rills are running
full. The grass is newly coolly