We can readily imagine what a delicious liquid hickory milk must be in which to cook hominy, rice, and similar kinds of grain; and there would be no danger from tuberculosis in this natural product of the vegetable kingdom. Perhaps at some future day, when milch cows are as rare in this country as they have been for ages in China and Japan, hickory milk will come into vogue again and be more highly valued by our people than it ever was by the aborigines. While we have no romantic tales to repeat in which either hickory trees or the nuts have played an important part, yet we can well imagine that such delicious food must, in ages past, as well as in our own times, have been a coveted luxury, enjoyed at many a social gathering of friends and neighbors. Many a country boy and girl has welcomed the early autumn frosts, because they announced the opening of the nutting season, reminding them of the long winter evenings near at hand, and that the industrious and nimble squirrel was a sharp competitor in the nutting field; consequently, no time could be wasted if a store of such luxuries was to be gathered for home use, or to be sent to city or village market for the benefit of less fortunate consumers. It is to be hoped that this source of pleasure and profit may continue long after the original forests of our country have disappeared, and through the preservation and planting of the noble food-bearing hickories by the roadsides, in orchards, also for shelter, shade and ornament. Valuable as hickory timber and hickory nuts have always been to the inhabitants of this country, we might reasonably suppose that there would be many thousands of these trees planted every year, in order to keep up a supply and make good the annual loss sustained in the destruction constantly going on in our forests. But no such plantings appear to have been undertaken in our Northern States, and only quite recently in the Southern, where the pecan nut is attracting considerable attention, on account of the increase in demand, and the advance in price obtained for them in the markets. Furthermore, with the many millions of dollars expended by the general government to encourage the planting, preservation and cultivation of forest trees, no special encouragement has been extended to the nut-bearing kinds, and the man who plants a cottonwood or worthless willow is given as much credit as though he planted and reared a tree a thousand times more valuable to himself and the country at large. This may not be a very creditable phase of nut culture in the United States, but it is history, nevertheless, and to attempt to suppress it would merely be encouraging negligence, which has already become so general that the inferior varieties of hickory nuts command a much higher price in our markets than the very choicest did a few years ago.