Page:Tree Crops (1953).pdf/147

 pressed life, but it grew a little and got its roots well established.

The moment the big tree was taken away, sunshine, light, and free fertility made the erstwhile starveling grow rapidly to fill the place of the old giant that had made its final grand cash contribution. This regular system of retirements and replacements kept these orchards continually replenished tree by tree—generation after generation—century after century.

I asked one of my Corsican informants how long these orchards had been established. This man happened to be a government official from the nearby city who spent his summers in the chestnut village of his nativity.

"Oh," said he, "a hundred years, five hundred years, a thousand years—always!"

In English phrase he might have said, "The memory of man runneth not to the contrary." It seems to be a matter of record that the chestnut was introduced into Corsica by the soldiers of the Roman occupation in the second century A.D., and the gentleman was right in maintaining that the chestnut business of his mountainside had been going on uninterruptedly for many centuries.