Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/131

Rh But if I was glad to see the frost grapes, I was gladder still to see a certain hickory tree. I was scarcely off the marsh before I came to it, and had hardly put my eye upon it before I said to myself (although so far as I could have specified, it looked like any other hickory; but there is a kind of knowledge, or half knowledge, that does not rest upon specifications), "There! That should be a bitternut tree." Now the bitternut is not to be called a rarity, I am assured; but somehow I had never found it, notwithstanding I was a nut-gatherer in my youth, and have continued to be one to this day, an early taste for wild forage being one of the virtues that are seldom outgrown. Well, something distracted my attention just then, and I contented myself with putting a leaf and a handful of nuts into my pocket. Only on getting home did I crack one and find it bitter. Now, several days afterward, I have cracked another, and tested it more fully. The shell is extremely thin,—like a pecan nut's for fragility,—and the meat, which is large and full, is both bitter and puckery, suggesting the brown inner partitions of a