The Red Men waited for the May Moon to wax full and the truce flowers of the white dogwood to signal frost’s surrender from the wood edges before they planted their maize. We wait for the first blooming of an apple tree to tell us that the springtide is at its height. Not one of the opulent, well-fed orchard trees, having all the advantages of a protected location, but a wayside, ungrafted scion of the old orchard standing alone in a field, on the north side of the spruce wind break. We called this tree “the Messenger.” It is the bearer of inconsequent fruit akin to the wild, but in May it is garlanded with firm-fleshed, deep rose-hued blossoms. When this tree opens its buds, we know that its kindred of the hill country will also be decked, and it is our time to go forth, for here the Maying is the festival of the Apple Blossoms, and the blushing snow of it veils the grim gray hills, and brocades the silken emerald of the grassy lowlands every May as completely as the gold and purple of golden-rod and aster mantle the land in autumn. People make journeys to the Orient to see the Festival of Fruit Blossoms, where many of the trees enclosed in gardens are shown with suggestion both of art and artifice; all this is deemed wonderful because it is far away. Distance promises change, and change is seemingly the key-note of current life. Perpetuity was the ambition of our forbears, else we should not be here. Yet when the near-by holds a Festival of Apple Blossoms reaching from our doors to the horizon line that travels before us, when we try to reach it, do we make a national event of it? Who goes out? Who sees? The reeds shaking in the wind, perhaps; the bluebirds that nest in the hollow tree trunks; the flaming orioles that, grown wanton with spring joy, rifle the honeyed blossoms; but people, where are they? No parties of school children playing in the abandoned orchards, no others sauntering along the highways like ourselves. For the twenty years that we have gone up through the hill country for this Maying, we have never met any others bent upon the same errand. So we call this festival our own, and as we stray along, we conjure up companions from the past to bear us company; the people who planted the orchards that still remain and blossom through all the neglect and moss that Time has dropped upon them. Each year, though we traverse mainly the same roads, by some fashion we always come upon some place or sign that has before escaped us, though rarely anything that brings past and present together as happened on the day that we played _make believe_ and set out to find the Tree of Life. * * * * *