Page:The Homes of the New World- Vol. II.djvu/199

Rh branches broken, plucked off amid the laughter and talk of the company, and then came many others from the train and leapt over the fence and into the orchard. But now a voice was heard in the distance, and that voice must have sounded to those apple-covetous sons of Adam, something like the voice of the Lord when it was heard in the Garden of Eden by the first Adam, after that first eating of the forbidden fruit, although not perhaps quite so awfully. Certain however it is that they took to their heels, and threw over the fence, on to the road, all the apples they could snatch from the tree, and sprang laughing, and still throwing apples before them over the fence and into the carriages, leaving the owner of the orchard to contemplate his despoiled and injured trees. I confess that this apple-scene and the spirit in which it was done very much astonished me.

“Is it possible,” said I to James Lowell, “that gentlemen can act in this manner?”

He shook his head silently; “And yet,” said I, “these young men looked like gentlemen. Many of them were handsome besides being well-dressed.”

I had many times heard of garden-robberies of fruit and flowers by young fellows, in the neighbourhood of great cities, especially around Philadelphia, and I had even asked my friends how this might be prevented. They confessed that it was so, but excused it by saying, that fruit was so plentiful and so cheap in this country, that nobody considered the taking of it as anything very important. And yet these young men, on this occasion, had ran away at the sound of the proprietor's voice, like any ordinary fruit-thieves. The only difference between the fruit-thieves of Europe and those of the New World seemed to be that the latter were not ashamed. Stealing fruit and destroying trees, as well as fleeing away from the owner of the orchard, all were equally signs of a low state of feeling.