The other is an apple tree, one of those beneficent creations, good Samaritans among fruit trees, that bear a toothsome, early-ripening crop, and spill a generous portion of it on the roadward side of the wall. I remember it perfectly--the fruit, I mean--color, shape, and flavor. Every year I see apples of the same name in the market, but somehow I can never buy any that look or taste half so good as those that I used in lucky moments to find here, waiting for me, in the roadside grass. Those were Old Testament times in New England. Gleanings belonged to “the poor and the stranger.” Who could dispute our title? We believed in special providences; and edible windfalls on the nigh side of the fence were among the chiefest of them. Schoolboys of the present day, I take for granted, are brought up under a different code. They would go past such temptations with their hands in their pockets and without a squint sideways. They apprehend no difference between “picking up” an apple and stealing one. Such is the evolution of morality. The day of the gleaner is past. Naomi and Ruth have become mythical personages, as much so as Romulus and Remus. I was going first to Harvey White’s pasture (not to dwell unsafely upon confessions that begin to seem like thin ice), and by and by came to the wood-path leading to it. How perfectly I remembered the place: this speedy, uphill curve to the left, rounding the hill; this dense bunch of low-branched evergreens a little farther on, under which, with our pails full (or half full--we could not work miracles, though we lived under the Mosaic economy), we used to creep for rest and shade while trudging homeward on blazing summer noons. But the path was surprisingly overgrown. At short intervals thorny smilax vines (cat-briers) were sprawling over the very middle of it, and had to be edged through cautiously. The appearance of things grew less and less familiar. I must be on the right track, but surely I had gone far enough. The broad clearing should be close at hand. I went on and on. Yes, here was the old stone wall between Harvey White’s pasture and Pine-tree pasture. But the pastures themselves? They were not here. Then it came over me, with all the force and suddenness of a direct revelation, that forty years is a long time. In less time than that a pasture may become a forest. I pushed about a little, in one direction and another, and finding nothing but woods, returned to the path and retraced my steps. I might as well try to find my own lost youth as those well-remembered huckleberry patches.