"Now the small folks with pails are sent to pick up ripe plums under the trees, and warned against eating too many. 'Remember last year,' says mother, and they do remember. The larger boys spread strips of burlap and rag carpet under the fullest trees, in turn, and give their branches a good beating that showers the plums down. With difficulty the boys and girls make their way into the thicket; but torn jackets and aprons and scratched hands can be mended—such accidents are overlooked in the excitement of filling the grain sacks with ripe fruit. How fine 'plum butter' will taste on the bread and butter of the noon lunch when winter comes and school begins. (The Pennsylvanian's love for 'spreads' on his bread leavened the West completely.)
"Other neighbours have come, and started in with a vim. It seems unreasonable to take any more. The bags are full, and there are some poured loose into the wagon box. Besides, everybody is tired, and John shouts that the hazel-nuts are ripe on the other side of the log road.
"A great grape vine, loaded with purple clusters, claims mother's attention. There will probably be no better chance for grapes this fall, and the sun is still an hour high. John chops down the little tree that supports it and the girls eagerly help to fill the pails with the fruit of the prostrate vine, while John goes back to command the hazel-nut brigade and sees that no eager youngster strays too far.
"Mother's voice gives the final summons, and the children gather at the wagon, tired but regretful for the filled husks that they must leave behind on the hazel bushes. A loaded branch of the grape vine is cut off bodily, and lifted into the wagon. The team is hitched on, and the happy passengers in the wagon turn their faces homeward."
Such was the poetry of pioneer life. Pleasures were simple, primitive, hearty—like the work—closely interlinked with the fight against starvation. There was nothing dull or uninteresting about either. The plums and grapes were sweetened with molasses made from sorghum cane. Each farmer grew a little strip, and one of them had a mill to which every one hauled his cane to be ground "on the shares."
Who will say that this "long sweetenin'" was poor stuff, that the quality of the spiced grapes suffered for lack of sugar, or that any modern preserves have a more excellent flavour than those of the old days made out of the wild plums gathered in the woods? And this is also true: There is no more exhilarating holiday conceivable than those half days when mother took the children and "went a-plummin'."
NUTS
The wild nuts gathered in this country for sale or home use in the North are chestnuts, hickory nuts, black walnuts, butternut, hazel-nut, beechnut; in the South, the pecan and the chinquapin; in the far West, the pine nut. The least known of these in eastern markets are the pine nuts, which form a very staple article of food for many tribes of Indians in the Great Basin. John Muir says that there are tens of thousands of acres covered with nut pines. An industrious Indian family can gather fifty or sixty bushels in a month if the snow does not catch them. The little cones are beaten off with poles as the trees are not high, and are heated till they open and the nuts fall out from under the scales. I have eaten pine nuts in Turkish restaurants. They came as a surprise in a dish of eggplant stuffed with chopped meat, raisins, nuts, bread crumbs, and I know not what all else.
The native chestnut, though smaller, is far sweeter than the popular Spanish one. But it looks as if some foreigner must take the place of our native chestnuts in the woods as well as in the market. The chestnut disease which has driven the trees out of the parks and wood lots near New York City is baffling the scientists. Every year the deadline moves westward and southward and northward from its center. Perhaps a cure will be found before all the chestnuts are gone. If any region has a few trees which seem to withstand the disease while all the rest die, those trees should be preserved and used to propagate a race of chestnuts which would be immune. It may be that the Spanish and Japanese chestnuts will prove hardier than our own. These are being grown quite extensively in some Eastern states. They bear when remarkably young. Japanese chestnuts begin to bear, according to the nurserymen, "at three years of age, bear from three to seven nuts in a bur, each nut measuring from four to five inches in circumference." Trees five years old bear two or three quarts each and the yield increases rapidly from year to year. These bring fancy prices in city markets and are eaten either raw or cooked.