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It has a railway station now, but looks much as it did at the time of my story a small, old-fashioned country town, situated among corn and orchard lands in one of the cider-making counties, with a newspaper, a sheriff's court, and sundry quiet shops and alehouses.
Never quite the same from day to day: Now weeding, now hay, now roots, now hedging; now corn, with sowing, reaping, threshing, stacking, thatching; the care of beasts, and their companionship; sheep-dipping, shearing, wood-gathering, apple-picking, cider-making; fashioning and tarring gates; whitewashing walls; carting; trenching never, never two days quite the same! Monotony!
He even remembered the thrill he had received as he went flying through the air, and how they had all laughed when he landed unhurt on a hay cock some distance down the hill, just clear of the overturned wagon. Then in the valley, at the foot of the hill, stood the old cider mill where neighbors for miles around would bring their apples in the late summer for cider-making.
"We must hurry the work, Bob, on the root cellar to take care of our apples," said his aunt. "All right, Aunt Bettie," he replied; "it's nearly finished." A few days after the cider-making had been completed, the new milking machine arrived. The agent for the manufacturers sent a man to show Bob how to erect it. When the machine had been completed and tried out, they tested it out that night.
On this account his face had been seen but fitfully in Hintock; and he would probably have disappeared from the place altogether but for his slight business connection with Melbury, on whose premises Giles kept his cider-making apparatus, now that he had no place of his own to stow it in.
Morton persisted in talking about Clara Hague. She spoke of their childhood, of the old homestead, of the nutting, the apple-picking, the cider-making, and the hundred other occupations and amusements of their young life. She had a vivid power of description, and a charming simplicity in her choice of words, that entertained even me; but I could see Mr. Redfield was troubled.
The cider-making of New England is far more picturesque; the great heap of golden or rosy apples under the trees, and the cider-mill worked by a circumgyratory horse, and all agush with sweet juice.
Such is the simplest method of cider-making, and it produces a drink thoroughly appreciated by the men, for we made annually 1,500 to 2,000 gallons, and there was very little left when next year's cider-making began.
"I should like to pick them up when they are ripe," said Clara, and Malcolm expressed a desire to hire himself out by the day to Mr. Grove when that time arrived. "An apple-orchard in autumn," continued their governess, "is often a merry scene. Ladders are put against the trees, and the finest apples are carefully picked off, but such as are to be used for cider-making are shaken to the ground.
On calm nights the air is pungent and warm with the perfume of tons of apples lying heaped in the orchards, ready for the cider-making, nights, when the owls hoot dismally under a silver moon. When the wind veers to the north it grows cold. On such nights as these "the Essence of Selfishness" seeks my fireside. She is better fed than many other children in the lost village beyond my wall.
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