dense woods are very
tall and slender. I frequently pluck from these trees a perfectly mild
and tamed fruit. As Palladius says, "And the ground is strewn with the
fruit of an unbidden apple-tree."

It is an old notion, that, if these wild trees do not bear a valuable
fruit of their own, they are the best stocks by which to transmit to
posterity the most highly prized qualities of others. However, I am not
in search of stocks, but the wild fruit itself, whose fierce gust has
suffered no "inteneration." It is not my

"highest plot
To plant the Bergamot."

THE FRUIT, AND ITS FLAVOR.

The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of
November. They then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they
are still, perhaps, as beautiful as ever. I make a great account of
these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to
gather,--wild flavors of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting. The
farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels; but he is mistaken,
unless he has a walker's appetite and imagination, neither of which can
he have.

Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of November, I
presume that the owner does not mean to gather. They belong to children
as wild as themselves,--to certain active boys that I know,--to the
wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes amiss, who gleans
after all the world,--and, moreover, to us walkers. We have met with
them, and they are ours. These rights, long enough insisted upon, have
come to be an institution in some old countries, where they have
learned how to live. I hear that "the custom of grippling, which may be
called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly, practised in Herefordshire.
It consists in leaving a few apples, which are called the gripples, on
every tree, after the general gathering, for the boys, who go with
climbing-poles and bags to collect them."

As for those I speak of, I pluck them as a wild fruit, native to this
quarter of the earth,--fruit of old trees that have been dying ever
since I was a boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the
wood-pecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, who has not
faith enough to look under their boughs. From the appearance of the
tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect nothing but lichens to
drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground strewn
with spirited fruit,--some of it, perhaps, collected at squirrel-holes