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Nearly all the Saturday afternoons were spent by the children in apple-gathering or in nutting, and autumn seemed to them as summer had seemed before autumn, spring before summer, and winter in its turn before spring, the very pleasantest of the four pleasant seasons of the year.
"And in about six years there will be one who will appreciate this tree as we have never appreciated it. I can see the little chap running after the apples." "But, Ned, it may be a girl." "Then it will be like you, dear." She said she would send a telegram and Ned shook the boughs, and their apple-gathering seemed to be portentous.
Vintaging needs no praises, nor does apple-gathering; even when the apples are for cider, they are never acrid enough to baffle a child's tooth. Yet even those children who are so unlucky as never to have worked in a real field, but have been compelled to vary their education with nothing but play, are able to comfort themselves with the irregular harvest of the hedges.
Oh, the old farm days! how the fragrance of them still lingers in my heart! the spring with its farm, the returning birds, and the full, lucid trout-streams; the summer with its wild berries, its haying, its cool, fragrant woods; the fall with its nuts, its game, its apple-gathering, its holidays; the winter with its school, its sport on ice and snow, its apple-bins in the cellar, its long nights by the fireside, its voice of fox-bounds on the mountains, its sound of flails in the barn how much I still dream about these things!
I learned from him that his name was William Keil, and that he was born at Bleicherode in Prussian Saxony. He now left the apple-gathering to his men, and offered to show us whatever was interesting about the colony: as to the life-insurance project, he said he would take some more convenient opportunity to speak with Mr. Körner about it.
I, only a few minutes after, said something about wishing we were not "strangers." "Do you?" The lad's half amazed, half-grateful smile went right to my heart. "Have you been up and down the country much?" "A great deal these last three years; doing a hand's turn as best I could, in hop-picking, apple-gathering, harvesting; only this summer I had typhus fever, and could not work."
The fishing, the hunting, the berrying, the Sundays on the hills or in the woods, the sugar-making, the apple-gathering all had a holiday character. But the hoeing corn, and picking up potatoes, and cleaning the cow stables, had little of this character. I have never been a cog in the wheel of any great concern. I have never had to sink or lose my individuality.
He did not grow tired of the gardens, gay with dahlias and hollyhocks, and asters: nor of the orchards, where the ladder against the tree, and the basket under, showed that apple-gathering was going on; nor of the nooks in the fields, where blackberries were ripening; nor of the chequered sunlight and shadow which lay upon the road; nor of the breezy heath where the blue ponds were ruffled; nor of the pleasant grove where the leaves were beginning to show a tinge of yellow and red, here and there among the green.
And it suddenly rushed into my mind that the time would no doubt come when the conduct of apples, being plucked from the mother tree, would inspire us, and we should say: "They're really very good!" And I wondered, were those future watchers of apple-gathering farther from me than I, watching sheep-shearing, from the postman?
They shone so that lamps would hardly be brighter. The apple-gathering, under such a sun, was nearly as warm and brilliant as a vintage; and indeed it was of the Italian autumn that you were reminded. There were the same sunburnt tones, the same brown health. There was the dark smile of chestnut woods as among the Apennines.
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