Right at this point stands an ancient russet-apple tree, which seems no older and brings forth no smaller apples now than it did when I first knew it. How natural it looks in every knot and branch! Strange, too, that it should be so, since I do not recall its ever contributing the first mouthful to my pleasures as a schoolboy gastronomer. In those times I judged a tree solely by the New Testament standard, very literally interpreted,--"By their fruits ye shall know them." Now I have other tests, and can value an old acquaintance of this kind for its picturesqueness, though its apples be bitter as wormwood. I am making too much of the food question, and will therefore say nothing of strawberries, raspberries, thimbleberries, cranberries (which last were delicious, as we took them out of their icy ovens in the spring), pig-nuts, hazel-nuts, acorns, and the rest. Yet I will not pass by a small clump of dangleberry bushes (a September luxury not common in our neighborhood) and a lofty pear-tree. The latter, in truth, hardly belongs under this head; for though it bore superabundant crops of pears, not even a child was ever known to eat one. We called them iron pears, perhaps because nothing but the hottest fire could be expected to reduce them to a condition of softness. My mouth is all in a pucker at the mere thought of the rusty-green bullets. It did seem a pity they should be so outrageously hard, so absolutely untoothsome; for the tree, as I say, was a big one and provokingly prolific, and, moreover, stood squarely upon the roadside. What a godsend we should have found it, had its fruit been a few degrees less stony! Such incongruities and disappointments go far to convince me that the creation is indeed, as some theologians have taught, under a curse.