When Life Was Young Part 31

"Found it?" she asked us,--a question which I felt to be an embarra.s.sing one. With an air of triumph, she then displayed a fine yellow Sweet Harvey. "Oh, don't you think you are cunning?" muttered Tom. "But I'll find your h.o.a.rd all the same."

"Let me know when you do," replied Kate, with a provoking laugh.

"Oh, you'll know when I find it," said Tom. "I'll take what there is in it. That was all a blind--her going out to the grape-vine," he remarked to me, as Kate turned away about her work. "She went down there on purpose to fool us, and get us to hunt there for nothing."

I went home quite fully informed in regard to the ethics of apple-h.o.a.rds. The code was simple; it consisted in keeping one's own h.o.a.rd undiscovered, and in finding and robbing those of others.

"Have you got an apple-h.o.a.rd?" I asked Addison, as soon as I reached home.

For all reply, he winked his left eye to me.

"Doad's got one, too," he said, after I had had time to comprehend his stealth.

"You didn't tell me," I remarked.

Addison laughed. "That would be great strategy!" he observed, derisively, "to tell of it! But I only made mine day before yesterday. I thought the early apples were beginning to get good enough to have a h.o.a.rd. I want to get a big stock on hand for September town-meeting," he added. "I mean to carry a bushel or two, and peddle them out for a cent apiece. The Old Squire put me up to that last year, and I made two dollars and ninety cents. That's better than nothing."

"Are you really contented here? Are you homesick, ever?" I asked him.

"Well," replied Ad, judicially, after weighing my question a little, "it isn't, of course, as it would have been with me if it had not been for the War, and father had lived. I should be at school now and getting ahead fast. But it is of no use to think of that; father and mother are both in their graves, and here I am, same as you and Doad are. We have got to make our way along somehow and get what education we can. It is of no use to be discontented. We are lucky to have so good a place to go to. I like here pretty well, for I like to be in the country better, on the whole, than in the city. Things are sort of good and solid here. The only drawback is that there isn't much chance to go to school; but after this year, I hope to go to the Academy, down at the village, ten or twelve weeks every season."

"Then you mean to try to get an education?" I asked, for it looked to me to be a vast undertaking.

"I do," replied Addison, hopefully. "Father meant for me to go to college, and I mean to go, even if I get to be twenty before I am fitted to enter. I will not grow up an ignoramus. A man without education is a n.o.body nowadays. But with a good education, a man can do almost anything."

"Halse doesn't talk that way," said I.

"I presume to say he doesn't," replied Addison. "He and I do not think alike."

"But Theodora says that she means to go to school and study a great deal, so as to do something which she has in mind, one of these days," I went on to say. "Do you know what it is?"

"Cannot say that I do," Addison replied, rather indifferently, as I thought.

"Oh, I suppose it is a good thing for girls to study and get educated,"

Addison continued. "But I do not think it amounts to so much for them as it does for boys."

This, indeed, was an opinion far more common in 1866 than at the present time.

"Perhaps it is to be a teacher?" I conjectured.

"Maybe," said Addison.

But I was thinking of apple-h.o.a.rds. There was a delightful proprietary sense in the idea of owning one. It stimulated some latent propensity to secretiveness, as also the inclination to play the freebooter in a small way.

This was the first time that I had ever had access to an orchard of ripening fruit, and those "early trees" are well fixed in my youthful recollections. Several of them stood immediately below the garden, along the upper side of the orchard. First there was the "August Pippin" tree, a great crotched tree, with a trunk as large round as a barrel. Somehow such trees do not grow nowadays.

The August Pippins began to ripen early in August. These apples were as large as a teacup, bright canary yellow in color, mellow, a trifle tart, and wonderfully fragrant. When the wind was right, I could smell those pippins over in the corn-field, fifty rods distant from the orchard. I even used to think that I could tell by the smell when an apple had dropped off from the tree!

Then there were the "August Sweets," which grew on four grafts, set into an old "drying apple" tree. They were pale yellow apples, larger even than the August Pippins, sweet, juicy and mellow. The old people called them "Pear Sweets."

Next were the "Sour Harvey," the "Sweet Harvey," and the "Mealy Sweet"

trees. The "Mealy Sweet" was not of much account; it was too dry, but the Harveys were excellent. Some of the Sweet Harveys were almost as sweet as honey; at least, I thought so then.

Then there were the "Noyes Apple" and the "Hobbs Apple." The Noyes was a deep-red, pleasant-sour apple, which ripened in the latter part of August; the Hobbs was striped red and green, flattened in shape, but of a fine, spicy flavor.

The "sops-in-wines," as, I believe, the fruit men term them, but which we called "wine-saps," were a pleasant-flavored apple, scarcely sweet, yet hardly sour. A little later came the "Porters" and "Sweet Greenings," also the "Nodheads" and the "Minute Apples," the "Georgianas" and the "Gravensteins," and so on until the winter apples, the princ.i.p.al product of the orchard, were reached.

We began eating those early apples by the first of August, in spite of all the terrible stories of colic which Gram told, in order to dissuade us from making ourselves ill. As the Pippins and August Sweets began to get mellow and palatable, we rivalled each other in the haste with which we tumbled out of doors early in the morning, so as to capture, each for himself or herself, the apples which had dropped from the trees overnight. Every one of us soon had a private h.o.a.rd in which to secrete those apples which we did not eat at the time. There were numerous contests in rapid dressing and in reckless racing down-stairs and out into the orchard.

Little Wealthy, on account of her youth, was, to some degree, exempted from this ruthless looting. We all knew where her h.o.a.rd was, but spared it for a long time. She believed that she had placed it in a wonderfully secret place, and because none of us seemed to discover it, she boasted so much that Ellen and I plundered it one morning, before she was awake, to give her a wholesome lesson in humility.

A little later, just before the breakfast hour, Wealthy stole out to her preserve--to find it empty. I never saw a child more mortified. She felt so badly that she could scarcely eat breakfast, and her lip kept quivering. The others laughed at her, and soon she left the table, and no doubt shed tears in secret over her loss.

After breakfast Ellen and I sought her out, and offered to give back the apples that we had taken. The child was too proud, however, to obtain them in such a way, and refused to touch one of them.

No such clemency as had been shown to Wealthy was practised by any one toward the others; no quarter was given or taken in the matter of robbing h.o.a.rds. For a month this looting went on, and was a great contest of wits.

[Ill.u.s.tration: THE EARLY APPLES.]

Theodora's was the only h.o.a.rd that escaped detection during the entire summer and autumn. She had her apples hidden in an empty bee-hive, which stood out in the garden under the "bee-shed" about midway in the row of thirteen hives. The most of us were a little afraid of the bees, but Theodora was one of those persons whom bees seem never to sting. She was accustomed to care for them, and thus to be about the hives a great deal. Not one of us happened to think of that empty bee-hive. The shed and some lilac shrubs concealed the place from the house; and Doad went unsuspected to and from the hive, which she kept filled with apples. We spent hours in searching for her h.o.a.rd, but did not learn where she had concealed it until she told us herself, two years afterwards.

Ellen had the worst fortune of us all. We found her h.o.a.rd regularly every few days. At first she hid it in the wagon-house, then up garret, and afterward in the wood-shed; but no sooner would she acc.u.mulate a little stock of apples than some one of us, who had spied on her goings and comings, would rob her. Even Wealthy found Nell's h.o.a.rd once, and robbed it of nearly a half-bushel of apples. Nell always bore her losses good-denature, and obtained satisfaction occasionally by plundering Halse and me.

I remember that my first h.o.a.rd was placed in the very high, thick "double" wall of the orchard. I loosened and removed a stone from the orchard side of the wall, and then took out the small inside stones from behind it until I had made a cavity sufficient to hold nearly a bushel.

Into this cavity I put my apples, and then fitted the outer stone back into its place, thus making the wall look as if it had not been disturbed. This device protected my apples for nearly a fortnight; but at length Ellen, who was on my track, observed me disappear suspiciously behind the wall one day, and an hour or two later took occasion to reconnoiter the place where I had disappeared.

She pa.s.sed the hidden cavity several times, and would not have discovered it, if she had not happened to smell the mellow August Pippins of my h.o.a.rd. Guided by the fragrance which they emitted, she examined the wall more closely, and finally found the loose stone. When I went to my preserve, after we had milked the cows that evening, I found only the empty hole in the wall.

I next essayed to conceal my h.o.a.rd in the ground. In the side of a knoll, screened from the house by the orchard wall and a thick nursery of little apple trees, I secretly dug a hole which I lined with new cedar shingles. For a lid to the orifice leading into it, I fitted a sod. A little wild gooseberry bush overhung the spot, and I fancied that I had my apples safely hidden.

But never was self-confidence worse misplaced! It was a cloudy, wet afternoon in which I had thus employed myself. Halse had gone fishing; but Addison chanced to be up garret, reading over a pile of old magazines, as was his habit on wet days. From the attic window he espied the top of my straw hat bobbing up and down beyond the wall, and as he read, he marked my operations.

With cool, calculating shrewdness he remained quiet for three or four days, till I had my new h.o.a.rd well stocked with "Sweet Harveys," then made a descent upon it and cleared it out. Next morning, when, with great stealth and caution, I had stolen to the place, I found my miniature cavern empty except for a bit of paper, on which, with a lead-pencil, had been hastily inscribed the following tantalizing bit of doggerel:

"He hid his h.o.a.rd in the ground And thought it couldn't be found; But forgot, as indeed he should not, That the attic window overlooked the spot."

For about three minutes I felt very angry, then I managed to summon a grin, along with a resolve to get even with Addison--for I recognized his handwriting--by plundering his h.o.a.rd, if by any amount of searching it were possible to find it. Addison was supposed to have the best and biggest h.o.a.rd of all, and thus far none of us had got even an inkling as to where it was hidden.

I watched him as a cat might watch a mouse for two days, and made pretty sure that he did not go to his h.o.a.rd in the daytime. Then I bethought myself that he always had a pocketful of apples every morning, and concluded that he must visit his preserve sometime "between days," most likely directly after he appeared to retire to his room at night.

So on the following night I lay awake and listened. After about half an hour of silence, I heard the door of his room open softly. With equal softness I stole out, and followed Addison through the open chamber of the ell, down a flight of stairs into the wagon-house, and then down another flight into the carriage-house cellar.

He had a lamp in his hand. When he entered the cellar the door closed after him, so that I did not dare go farther. I went back into the chamber, concealing myself, and waited to observe his return. He soon made his appearance, eating an apple; there was a smile on his face, and his pockets were protuberant.

Next day I proceeded to search the wagon-house cellar, but for some time my search was in vain.

There was in the cellar a large box-stove, into which I had often looked, but had seen only a ma.s.s of old brown paper and corn-husks. On this day I went to the stove and pulled out the rubbish, when lo! in the farther end I saw three salt boxes, all full of Pippins and August Sweetings.

I was not long in emptying those boxes, but I wanted to leave in the place of the apples a particularly exasperating bit of rhyme. I studied and rhymed all that forenoon, and at last, with much mental travail, I got out the following skit, which I left in the topmost box: