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13, 1860.] also in the handlights in the garden, made as bright as her drawing-room windows. She says the plants want every ray of light that can be had, now that the sun looks at us so aslant. She helps Harry, too, to guard his own small concerns against the coming frosts, regarding it as an educational process. So they have bent sallows over the child’s most precious plants, and have hung mats over, which it is a daily business of the utmost consequence to take off when the sun is up, and remember to put down before sunset.

The grand pleasure of the time, however, is the clearing of the orchard—the gathering of the winter fruits. It has been an agreeable daily task to pick out the ripest swans-egg and bergamot pears from the sunniest boughs, and to cherish the later grapes, trimming away every doubtful berry, and pruning to within an inch of the bunch; but the real festival is the apple gathering.

We are all on the watch as to the proceedings of our cider-brewing neighbours. Somebody bursts into the kitchen or parlour with news that Farmer A. or B. is having his barrels cleaned and aired, and the baskets and cloths washed and dried, and the mill inspected, and the vats scoured; and then we make ready to strip our trees. We cannot make so boisterous an affair of it as our neighbours, who are going to crush their apples immediately. We are going to keep ours; so we take the means of keeping them, pulling each with a gentle wrench, and handling all as if they were eggs. Those that fall are kept separate, and freely allowed for anybody’s immediate use. My wife has no idea of shutting them up “to sweat” in straw or sawdust, or even sand. We do not like tainted apples, be the taint ever so innocent. A clean room, and plenty of air, dry wiping after the sweating, and then plenty of air again, as they lie on clean wood (door or shelf)—this is her recipe for keeping apples as long as apples can be kept.

There are few sights pleasanter than the last hour of apple-cropping on a sunny October afternoon, when the house is deserted, and all the family, and a few neighbours, and perhaps a beggar or two are standing in the sun, and peering into the trees for the last bit of gold-green or russet fruit, or rejoicing over the basket and barrow loads, and broad piles of apples. But this year we shall be more thankful than ever before for a plentiful crop, for never, I fear, was the excellent nourishment covered up with the rind of the apple more needed than it seems likely to be this winter. It is not generally understood that the apple is prime among fruits for the same excellence which makes the potato prime among vegetables—the high quality and good combination of the nourishment it contains. The alimentary chemists tell us that the apple, when truly ripened, is much more than a luxury. With the stimulating quality of one species of food it unites the nourishing properties of another, and thus it is a real resource, if it were but known, when meat and flour are dearest. If provisions should be as dear as we expect this next winter, we must do our utmost with our prodigious crop of apples. Apples and rice will be about the cheapest articles procurable; and it will not cost us much—us who grow apples—to put a good many into the cottages and little shops near us, with plenty of rice (broken rice for cheapness, which is just as good, though not so handsome, as whole rice), to make a substantial meal for hungry folk.

When we leave the orchard, there is always a merry set of fellows ready to enter it. We give it up to the village boys, who have leave to take all they can find, on the clear understanding that no injury shall be done to the trees. It will be easily understood that the smallest apples are left on purpose, and here and there a few which are not of the smallest. By the shouts and laughter which reach us in the house, they seem to be well amused till it is too dark to pretend to find more apples.

One more peculiarity of October must be noticed—a solemn and sweet feature of the time. As the fruits of one year fall, the seeds of centuries of growth are sown. By the mechanism of nature, the stocking of the earth with every kind of growth, from the oak of a thousand years to the weed of a day, is carried on. The acorn falls on moist earth, and is trodden in by man or beast; the berries of the mountain ash are carried by birds, and dropped on ledges of rock, where they strike in any handful of soil that may be there. Winged seeds are floated by the winds till they stop in some favourable place. The light and downy sorts are spread abroad by every breeze that blows. Those that are hooked are conveyed by the coats of browsing animals. While men are putting seeds into the ground by millions with all due care, Nature is planting and sowing on a much larger scale, surpassing man while he is busy, and going on while he is sleeping or making holiday. To appreciate what is thus done, one has only to try to count the plants on the turf one has been lying on, on any common, or the seedlings within any square yard of airy woodland. Now is the time to see how the replenishing of the earth begins before it is emptied of its ripened produce. For every tree that is felled thousands are sown; and for every flower that falls millions more are provided. What my girls have been doing with pains and care, in their bed of spring bulbs, is done silently over all the continents and islands in our zone. New life is provided for before decay begins.

“I don’t know how it was, but I never could feel to dislike him—not when I knew all about it; and I don’t believe, now, he meant to act the villain, and leave her. As he said, if it hadn’t been for the drink, he might have been alive and happy now. It’s a bad thing for a man not to be able to regulate his drink; causes him lots of misfortunes. Chaps like him ought to leave it off altogether; still it’s a hard thing to see fellows jolly, and not join; makes a fellow feel like a wet blanket to his mates—they’re so jolly and merry, and he drinking his lemonade or water. It’s rather hard, I should think.

“The boy, he kept on saying, ‘A sail! A sail!’ He was gone cranky, you see—didn’t know where