!"

"They then shout in chorus, one of the boys accompanying them on a
cow's horn. During this ceremony they rap the trees with their sticks."
This is called "wassailing" the trees, and is thought by some to be "a
relic of the heathen sacrifice to Pomona."

Herrick sings,--

"Wassaile the trees that they may beare
You many a plum and many a peare;
For more or less fruits they will bring
As you so give them wassailing."

Our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine; but
it behooves them to sing better than English Phillips did, else they
will do no credit to their Muse.

THE WILD APPLE.

So much for the more civilized apple-trees (urbaniores, as Pliny calls
them). I love better to go through the old orchards of ungrafted
apple-trees, at whatever season of the year,--so irregularly planted:
sometimes two trees standing close together; and the rows so devious
that you would think that they not only had grown while the owner was
sleeping, but had been set out by him in a somnambulic state. The rows
of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them like these.
But I now, alas, speak rather from memory than from any recent
experience, such ravages have been made!

Some soils, like a rocky tract called the Easterbrooks Country in my
neighborhood, are so suited to the apple, that it will grow faster in
them without any care, or if only the ground is broken up once a year,
than it will in many places with any amount of care. The owners of this
tract allow that the soil is excellent for fruit, but they say that it
is so rocky that they have not patience to plough it, and that,
together with the distance, is the reason why it is not cultivated.
There are, or were recently, extensive orchards there standing without
order. Nay, they spring up wild and bear well there in the midst of
pines, birches, maples, and oaks. I am often surprised to see rising
amid these trees the rounded tops of apple-trees glowing with red or
yellow fruit, in harmony with the autumnal tints of the forest.

Going up the side of a cliff about the first of November, I saw a
vigorous young apple-tree, which, planted by birds or cows, had shot up
amid the rocks and open woods there, and had now much fruit on it,
uninjured by the frosts, when all cultivated apples were gathered. It
was a rank wild growth, with many green leaves on it still, and made an
impression of thorniness. The fruit was har