The wilderness mystic was sitting up looking at me.

“I see two people in you,” he said.

“Only two?”

“Two separate men.”

“What are their names?”

“Their names I cannot see.”

“Well, suppose we call them Louis and Lazarre.”

His eyes sparkled.

“You are a white man,” he pronounced.  “By that I mean you are not stained with many vile sins.”

“I hadn’t an equal chance with other men.  I lost nine years.”

“Mebby,” hazarded Johnny Appleseed cautiously, “you are the one appointed to open and read what is sealed.”

“If you mean to interpret what you read, I’m afraid I am not the one.  Where did you get those leaves?”

“From a book that I divided up to distribute among the people.”

“Doesn’t that destroy the sense?”

“No.  I carry the pages in their order from cabin to cabin.”

He came around the fire with the lightness of an Indian, and gave me his own fragment to examine.  It proved to be from the writings of one Emanuel Swedenborg.

With a smile which seemed to lessen the size of his face and concentrate its expression to a shining point, Johnny Appleseed slid his leather bags along the rope girdle, and searched them, one after the other.  I thought he wanted me to notice his apple seeds, and inquired how many kinds he carried.  So he showed them in handfuls, brown and glistening, or gummed with the sweet blood of cider.  These produced pippins; these produced russets; these produced luscious harvest apples, that fell in August bursting with juicy ripeness.  Then he showed me another bagful which were not apple seeds at all, but neutral colored specks moving with fluid swiftness as he poured them from palm to palm.

“Do you know what this is?”

I told him I didn’t.

“It’s dogfennel seed.”

I laughed, and asked him what kind of apples it bore.

Johnny Appleseed smiled at me again.

“It’s a flower.  I’m spreading it over the whole of Ohio and Indiana!  It’ll come up like the stars for abundance, and fill the land with rankness, and fever and ague will flee away!”

“But how about the rankness?”

“Fever and ague will flee away,” he repeated, continuing his search through the bags.

He next brought out a parcel, wrapped up carefully in doeskin to protect it from the appleseeds; and turned foolish in the face, as bits of ribbon and calico fell out upon his knees.

“This isn’t the one,” he said, bundling it up and thrusting it back again.  “The little girls, they like to dress their doll-babies, so I carry patches for the little girls.  Here’s what I was looking for.”

It was another doeskin parcel, bound lengthwise and crosswise by thongs.  These Johnny Appleseed reverently loosened, bringing forth a small book with wooden covers fastened by a padlock.