When Life Was Young: At the Old Farm in Maine

by C. A. Stephens

But I was thinking of apple-hoards. There was a delightful proprietary sense in the idea of owning one. It stimulated some latent propensity to secretiveness, as also the inclination to play the freebooter in a small way.

This was the first time that I had ever had access to an orchard of ripening fruit, and those "early trees" are well fixed in my youthful recollections. Several of them stood immediately below the garden, along the upper side of the orchard. First there was the "August Pippin" tree, a great crotched tree, with a trunk as large round as a barrel. Somehow such trees do not grow nowadays.

The August Pippins began to ripen early in August. These apples were as large as a teacup, bright canary yellow in color, mellow, a trifle tart, and wonderfully fragrant. When the wind was right, I could smell those pippins over in the corn-field, fifty rods distant from the orchard. I even used to think that I could tell by the smell when an apple had dropped off from the tree!

Then there were the "August Sweets," which grew on four grafts, set into an old "drying apple" tree. They were pale yellow apples, larger even than the August Pippins, sweet, juicy and mellow. The old people called them "Pear Sweets."

Next were the "Sour Harvey," the "Sweet Harvey," and the "Mealy Sweet" trees. The "Mealy Sweet" was not of much account; it was too dry, but the Harveys were excellent. Some of the Sweet Harveys were almost as sweet as honey; at least, I thought so then.

Then there were the "Noyes Apple" and the "Hobbs Apple." The Noyes was a deep-red, pleasant-sour apple, which ripened in the latter part of August; the Hobbs was striped red and green, flattened in shape, but of a fine, spicy flavor.

The "sops-in-wines," as, I believe, the fruit men term them, but which we called "wine-saps," were a pleasant-flavored apple, scarcely sweet, yet hardly sour. A little later came the "Porters" and "Sweet Greenings," also the "Nodheads" and the "Minute Apples," the "Georgianas" and the "Gravensteins," and so on until the winter apples, the principal product of the orchard, were reached.

We began eating those early apples by the first of August, in spite of all the terrible stories of colic which Gram told, in order to dissuade us from making ourselves ill. As the Pippins and August Sweets began to get mellow and palatable, we rivalled each other in the haste with which we tumbled out of doors early in the morning, so as to capture, each for himself or herself, the apples which had dropped from the trees overnight. Every one of us soon had a private hoard in which to secrete those apples which we did not eat at the time. There were numerous contests in rapid dressing and in reckless racing down-stairs and out into the orchard.

Little Wealthy, on account of her youth, was, to some degree, exempted from this ruthless looting. We all knew where her hoard was, but spared it for a long time. She believed that she had placed it in a wonderfully secret place, and because none of us seemed to discover it, she boasted so much that Ellen and I plundered it one morning, before she was awake, to give her a wholesome lesson in humility.

A little later, just before the breakfast hour, Wealthy stole out to her preserve—to find it empty. I never saw a child more mortified. She felt so badly that she could scarcely eat breakfast, and her lip kept quivering. The others laughed at her, and soon she left the table, and no doubt shed tears in secret over her loss.