Page:The clerk of the woods.djvu/70

52 In the orchard, where the trees are younger and more pliable, a man would hardly know them for the same he saw there in May and June; so altered are they in shape, so smoothly rounded at the top, so like Babylonian willows in the droop of the branches. Baldwins are turning red—greenish red—and russets are already rusty. "Yes," says the owner of the orchard, "and much good will it do me." Apples are an "aggravating crop," he declares. "First there are none; and then there are so many that you cannot sell them." Human nature is never satisfied; and, for one, I think it seldom has reason to be.

A bobolink, which seems to be somewhere overhead, drops a few notes in passing. "I am off," he says. "Sorry to go, but I know where there is a rice-field." From the orchard come the voices of bluebirds and kingbirds. Not a bird is in song; and what is more melancholy, the road and the fields are thick with English sparrows.

Now I stop at the smell of growing corn, which is only another kind of grass, though the farmer may not suspect the fact, and