That last statement is bewildering. Is there anything that somebody, somewhere, does not find edible? I have heard of eaters of arsenic and of slate pencils; but chokecherries for sale in a market! If the reader’s mouth does not pucker at the words he must be wanting in imagination. In Franconia even the birds seemed to refuse such a tongue-tying diet. The shrubs loaded with fruit, some of it red (wine color), some of it black,--the latter color predominating, I think,--stood along the roadside mile upon mile. Sooner or later, I dare say, the birds must have recourse to them; how else do the bushes get planted so universally? But at the time of our visit there was a sufficiency of better fare. Rum cherries were still plentiful, and birds, like boys in an apple orchard, and like sensible people anywhere, take the best first. It surprised me, while I was here some years ago, to discover how fond woodpeckers of all kinds are of rum cherries. Even the pileated could not keep away from the trees, but came close about the house to frequent them. One unfortunate fellow, I regret to say, came once too often. The sapsuckers, it was noticed, went about the business after a method of their own. Each cherry was carried to the trunk of a tree or to a telegraph pole, where it was wedged into a crevice, and eaten with all the regular woodpeckerish attitudes and motions. Doubtless it tasted better so. And the bird might well enough have said that he was behaving no differently from human beings, who for the most part do not swallow fruit under the branches, but take it indoors and feast upon it at leisure, and with something like ceremony. The trunk of a tree is a woodpecker’s table. And for all that, Franconia woodpeckers are not so conservative as not to be able to take up with substantial improvements. They know a good thing when they see it. These same sapsuckers, or one of them, was not slow to discover that one of our crew, an entomological collector, had set up here and there pieces of board besmeared with a mixture of rum and sugar. And having made the discovery, he was not backward about improving it. He went the round of the boards with as much regularity as the moth collector himself, and with even greater frequency. And no wonder. Here was a feast indeed; victuals and drink together; insects preserved in rum. Happy bird! As the most famous of sentimental travelers said on a very different occasion, “How I envied him his feelings!” For there seems to be no doubt that sapsuckers love a liquid sweetness, and take means of their own to secure it.