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Rh (it invites breaking by its extreme fragility) for its leaf-buds, pointed, parti-colored,—brown and yellowish green,—tender-looking, but hardy enough to withstand all the rigors of New England frost. The broken end of the branch, where I get the spicy fragrance of the inner bark, brings back a sense of half-forgotten boyish pleasures. I used to nibble the bark in spring. A little dry it was, as I remember it, but it had the spicy taste of wintergreen (checkerberry), without the latter's almost excessive pungency, or bite. Some of my country-bred readers must have been accustomed to eat the tender reddish young checkerberry leaves, and will understand perfectly what I mean by that word "bite." I wonder if they had our curious Old Colony name for those vernal dainties. It sounds like cannibalism, but we gathered them and ate them in all innocence (the taste is on my tongue now) as "youngsters." No doubt the tree gets its name, "sweet birch," from this savoriness of its green inner bark, rather than from the pedagogic employment of its branches in schoolrooms as a means of promoting the sweet uses of adversity.