Page:The Swiss Family Robinson - 1851.djvu/157

142 healed before I put him to any hard work. I left Francis with his mother, to prepare our dinner, begging them not to forget the maccaroni.

We began at the entrance of the avenue to Falcon’s Nest, where all the trees were much bent by the wind. We raised them gently by a crow-bar; I made a hole in the earth, in which one of my sons placed the bamboo props, driving them firmly down with a mullet, and we proceeded to another, while Ernest and Jack tied the trees to them with a long, tough, pliant plant, which I suspected was a species of llana. As we were working, Fritz inquired if these fruit-trees were wild.

"A pretty question!" cried Jack. "Do you think that trees are tamed like eagles or buifaloes? You perhaps could teach them to bow politely, so that we might gather the fruit!"

"You fancy you are a wit," said I, "but you speak like a dunce. We cannot make trees bow at our pleasure; but we can make a tree, which by nature bears sour and uneatable fruit, produce what is sweet and wholesome. This is effected by grafting into a wild tree a small branch, or even a bud, of the sort you wish. I will show you this method practically at some fixture time, for by these means we can procure all sorts of fruit; only we must remember, that we can only graft a tree with one of the same natural family; thus, we could not graft an apple on a cherry-tree, for one belongs to the apple tribe, and the other to the plum tribe."

"Do we know the origin of all these European fruits?" asked the inquiring Ernest.

"All our shell fruits," answered I, "such as the