Part 31 (1/2)

”Found it?” she asked us,--a question which I felt to be an embarra.s.sing one. With an air of triumph, she then displayed a fine yellow Sweet Harvey. ”Oh, don't you think you are cunning?” muttered Tom. ”But I'll find your h.o.a.rd all the same.”

”Let me know when you do,” replied Kate, with a provoking laugh.

”Oh, you'll know when I find it,” said Tom. ”I'll take what there is in it. That was all a blind--her going out to the grape-vine,” he remarked to me, as Kate turned away about her work. ”She went down there on purpose to fool us, and get us to hunt there for nothing.”

I went home quite fully informed in regard to the ethics of apple-h.o.a.rds. The code was simple; it consisted in keeping one's own h.o.a.rd undiscovered, and in finding and robbing those of others.

”Have you got an apple-h.o.a.rd?” I asked Addison, as soon as I reached home.

For all reply, he winked his left eye to me.

”Doad's got one, too,” he said, after I had had time to comprehend his stealth.

”You didn't tell me,” I remarked.

Addison laughed. ”That would be great strategy!” he observed, derisively, ”to tell of it! But I only made mine day before yesterday. I thought the early apples were beginning to get good enough to have a h.o.a.rd. I want to get a big stock on hand for September town-meeting,” he added. ”I mean to carry a bushel or two, and peddle them out for a cent apiece. The Old Squire put me up to that last year, and I made two dollars and ninety cents. That's better than nothing.”

”Are you really contented here? Are you homesick, ever?” I asked him.

”Well,” replied Ad, judicially, after weighing my question a little, ”it isn't, of course, as it would have been with me if it had not been for the War, and father had lived. I should be at school now and getting ahead fast. But it is of no use to think of that; father and mother are both in their graves, and here I am, same as you and Doad are. We have got to make our way along somehow and get what education we can. It is of no use to be discontented. We are lucky to have so good a place to go to. I like here pretty well, for I like to be in the country better, on the whole, than in the city. Things are sort of good and solid here. The only drawback is that there isn't much chance to go to school; but after this year, I hope to go to the Academy, down at the village, ten or twelve weeks every season.”

”Then you mean to try to get an education?” I asked, for it looked to 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 n.o.body 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-h.o.a.rds. 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”