Between the fifth and twentieth of October I see the barrels lie under the trees.  And perhaps I talk with one who is selecting some choice barrels to fulfil an order.  He turns a specked one over many times before he leaves it out.  If I were to tell what is passing in my mind, I should say that every one was specked which he had handled; for he rubs off all the bloom, and those fugacious ethereal qualities leave it.  Cool evenings prompt the farmers to make haste, and at length I see only the ladders here and there left leaning against the trees.

It would be well, if we accepted these gifts with more joy and gratitude, and did not think it enough simply to put a fresh load of compost about the tree.  Some old English customs are suggestive at least.  I find them described chiefly in Brand’s “Popular Antiquities.”  It appears that “on Christmas eve the farmers and their men in Devonshire take a large bowl of cider, with a toast in it, and carrying it in state to the orchard, they salute the apple-trees with much ceremony, in order to make them bear well the next season.”  This salutation consists in “throwing some of the cider about the roots of the tree, placing bits of the toast on the branches,” and then, “encircling one of the best bearing trees in the orchard, they drink the following toast three several times:—­

  ’Here’s to thee, old apple-tree,
  Whence thou mayst bud, and whence thou mayst blow,
  And whence thou mayst bear apples enow! 
  Hats-full! caps-full! 
  Bushel, bushel, sacks-full! 
  And my pockets full, too!  Hurra!’”

Also what was called “apple-howling” used to be practised in various counties of England on New-Year’s eve.  A troop of boys visited the different orchards, and, encircling the apple-trees, repeated the following words:—­

  “Stand fast, root! bear well, top! 
  Pray God sent! us a good howling crop: 
  Every twig, apples big;
  Every bough, apples enow!”

“They then shout in chorus, one of the boys accompanying them on a cow’s horn.  During this ceremony they rap the trees with their sticks.”  This is called “wassailing” the trees, and is thought by some to be “a relic of the heathen sacrifice to Pomona.”

Herrick sings,—­

  “Wassaile the trees that they may beare
  You many a plum and many a peare;
  For more or less fruits they will bring
  As you so give them wassailing.”

Our poets have as yet a better right to sing of cider than of wine; but it behooves them to sing better than English Phillips did, else they will do no credit to their Muse.

THE WILD APPLE.

So much for the more civilized apple-trees (urbaniores, as Pliny calls them).  I love better to go through the old orchards of ungrafted apple-trees, at whatever season of the year,—­so irregularly planted:  sometimes two trees standing close together; and the rows so devious that you would think that they not only had grown while the owner was sleeping, but had been set out by him in a somnambulic state.  The rows of grafted fruit will never tempt me to wander amid them like these.  But I now, alas, speak rather from memory than from any recent experience, such ravages have been made!