There was one tree in the orchard from which the farmer had not picked his apples. Perhaps the apples were not worth picking. At any rate, the dried apples, shriveled and brown, are still hanging on the twigs, and even the birds do not seem to care for them. I broke off one of these twigs (Fig. 218). Let us see how many apples this interesting twig has borne. We can tell by the square-cut scars. An apple was once borne at 1, another at 2, another at 4, another at 5, another at 6, and another at 7,--and at 7 there will be a scar when the apple falls. Six apples this modest shoot has borne! And I wonder how many of them got ripe, or how many were taken by the worms, or how many were eaten by the little boys and girls on their way to school! A peculiar thing happened when the fruit was growing at 2. Two side buds started out, instead of one, and both of them grew the next year. But one of the little branchlets fell sick and died, or a bug nipped off its end, or it starved to death; and its memory is preserved by the little stick standing up at 3. The other branchlet thrived, and eventually bore apples at 4, 5, 6, and 7. I have said that these fruit-spurs bear only every other year; then, if this branch has borne six apples consecutively, it must be twelve years old. The truth is that it is about twenty years old, for some years it failed to bear; but the age cannot be traced out in the picture, although any little boy or girl with bright eyes could soon learn to trace out yearly rings on the shoot itself. IV. The last shoot that I got that day has a whole volume of history in it, and I cannot begin to tell its story unless I should write a small book. But we will trace out its birthdays and see how many apples it has borne. It is shown in Fig. 219, and because it is so long I have had to break it into several pieces to get it on the page. It begins at A, and is continued at B, C, D, E, and F. Let us count the yearly rings and see how old the whole limb is. These rings are at 28, 26, D, 12, 1,--five of them; and as the shoot grew one year before it made any ring, and another year made no increase in length--as we shall presently see--the whole branch must be seven years old. That is, the limb probably started in 1890.[43] Let us begin, then, at A, and follow it out. [43] It is really impossible to tell whether the shoot started from the limb A in 1889 or 1890, without knowing the age of A; for the spur may have developed its blossom bud at the end in either the first or second year of its life. That is, young fruit-spurs sometimes make a blossom bud the very year they start, but they oftener "stand still" the second year and delay the blossom bud until that time. 1890. Started as a spur from the main branch, A, and grew to 1. 1891. Apple borne at 1. This apple did not mature, however, as we can readily see by the smallness of the scar. In this year, two side buds developed to continue the spur the next year.