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Behold the clouds of pollen from the blooming pines and from the grasses in the meadow. She is less parsimonious with her winged seeds, such as of the maple and the elm, than with her heavy nuts butternuts, hickory-nuts, acorns, beechnuts, and so on. All these depend upon the agency of the birds and squirrels to scatter them.

"Nurse, you said there were acorns, and hickory-nuts, and beech-mast in the basket. I have seen acorns at home in dear England and Scotland, and I have eaten the hickory-nuts here; but what is beech-mast?

One of the best things in farming is gathering the chestnuts, hickory-nuts, butternuts, and even beechnuts, in the late fall, after the frosts have cracked the husks and the high winds have shaken them, and the colored leaves have strewn the ground. On a bright October day, when the air is full of golden sunshine, there is nothing quite so exhilarating as going nutting.

We congratulated each other, and started for camp with four fat turkeys, and fat indeed they were, for they had been feeding all autumn on walnuts, hickory-nuts, grapes, sweet acorns, and piñons, at or rather I suspect without discretion. We had a long trudge home, the turkeys getting apparently heavier every mile. As we tramped along my companion related his day's experience.

As they grew in size they increased exceedingly in naughtiness, and were banished shortly from the kitchen to an ell or back woodshed. They celebrated this distinction by dropping some hickory-nuts into a rubber boot hanging on the wall, and then gnawing a hole through the toe of the boot in order to extract the hidden nuts.

By this greed of the jay the wingless nuts take flight, oaks are planted amid the pines, and chestnuts amid the hemlocks. Speaking of nuts reminds me of an incident I read of the deer or white-footed mouse an incident that throws light on the limitation of animal intelligence. The writer gave the mouse hickory-nuts, which it attempted to carry through a crack between the laths in the kitchen wall.

He thought it might amuse your ladyship, and so he tamed it and sent it to me in a basket filled with moss, with some acorns, and hickory-nuts, and beech-mast for him to eat on his journey, for the little fellow has travelled a long way: he came from the beech-woods near the town of Coburg, in the Upper Province." "And where is Coburg, nurse? Is it a large city like Montreal or Quebec?"

The beech was quite hollow in the heart, and they went down through a hole in the branch, and found a store of hazel-nuts, with acorns, hickory-nuts, butter-nuts, and beech-mast, all packed quite close and dry.

I remember, too, how we gathered, in those same old autumnal days, hickory-nuts and butter-nuts by the bushel; and how pleasant it was in the long cold winter evenings, to sit around the great old kitchen fire-place, cracking the nuts we had gathered when the green, the yellow, the crimson, the brown, the grey, and the pale leaves were on the trees.

Come with me, and I will show you the funniest thing you ever saw in your life." "Is it far?" said Ting-a-ling, "for I must be back here by daylight." "O no! come on. It won't take you long, and I tell you, it's fun!" So away they ran, merrily vaulting over the hickory-nuts, or acorns, that happened to be in their way, in mere playfulness, as if they were nothing.