It must not be thought, however, that these exciting moments, when the apple tree was an island of refuge, made it altogether a tame and profitless retreat in quieter times. It was enjoyable for rest and recreation, and it formed an excellent watch-tower from which to spy out the land. In May the pink and white blossoms turned it into an exquisite bouquet. Later in the summer the big green fruit--though not agreeable if eaten raw--could be transformed into the highest triumph cooks ever achieved--the apple-pie. Near the top an almost horizontal branch made a tolerable seat. At about the level of our eyes, as we sat there, another branch stretched its smooth surface. The bark on it was new, and so plainly adapted to the use of a jack-knife that the symbols "E. M.," "J. R. T.," and "S. E.," deeply carven, indicated that Edward Mason, James Rogers Toppan, and Samuel Edwards had left their signs manual upon it. On the day of which I speak these gentlemen sat on the horizontal branch and devoured the contents of a roll of peppermint lozenges. I had had a cent that afternoon, and had expended it in this highly satisfactory form of pleasure. You got twelve tiny lozenges for a cent, and that made four apiece all round. In buying them you had to make serious choice between peppermint in yellow wrappers, checkerberry in green wrappers, cinnamon in pink wrappers, clove in brown wrappers (especially alluring because reputed to be dangerous--cloves having the well-known habit of "drying your blood"), and rose in purple wrappers--a particularly insipid flavor, often tried in the hope that it would taste different this time. The fun was not all over when you had eaten the lozenges (by a slow process of suction), for there still remained the paper wrapper. This had always printed upon it some legend of more or less interest. The yellow one, that inclosed these peppermint lozenges, bore a few moral and patriotic sentiments concerning the Father of Our Country. The three personages in the apple tree thereupon engaged in a discussion on the subject: Who was the greatest man that ever lived? Jimmy Toppan and I declared for George Washington, but Ed Mason, for some unexplained reason, brought in a minority report for Amerigo Vespucci. Then Jimmy Toppan was moved to relate an anecdote. "I heard somewhere that George Washington, or p'r'aps 'twas Daniel Webster, but anyhow it was _some one_, when he was a boy, once put a coin in the bark of a tree in his father's orchard. Then, a long time afterward, when he was President of the United States, he came back there, and went right up to the tree and took out his jack-knife and cut away the bark, and there was the piece of money! You see, the bark had grown over it, and covered it up all those years." This was an interesting bit of information!