“Then, when the day was done, he would knock at the door of a cabin, and after partaking of simple food, for which he would always offer to pay, either in coin of which he managed to earn enough to supply his few needs, or else in young apple trees, he would draw close to the lamp or throw himself on the floor by the fire, and pulling a tattered Bible from his shirt, open it and proclaim as one reading a letter, ‘Behold I have planted the Tree of Life at your doors, now hearken to the news fresh from Heaven.’ “To a few of the women, from time to time, he told detached fragments of his history, and my mother being one of these, recognized him almost by intuition as her kinsman John Chapman; and either feeling the distant tie of blood, or because we children gathered about him and hung on his words, he came to our cabin more frequently than to others, for next to his beloved trees, he loved little children and all animals. For women who tried to better his attire or sympathize with him, he had no eyes. ‘I have a wife waiting for me beside the gates of Paradise,’ he would say, ‘and what has she to do but busy her fingers in making me wedding garments, and none but of her making will I wear.’ As to his name, Johnny Appleseed was the only title he was known by in that country. “Every spring he returned to Pennsylvania for more seed, for which he bartered at the cider mills, and wherever he went his path was strewn with his kind deeds. Did he come across a sick horse left to die by pioneers, it was housed and fed at his expense. Did he meet a traveller more ragged than himself, he always found that he had a garment he could spare, until finally, a feed bag with opening for head and arms was his most common coat. “One autumn, being lame, he tarried a long while at our cabin; it was the year that I was ten, and word came that the Connecticut home in which my father was born had fallen to him, who, being the youngest, had been obliged to strike out for himself. At first my mother cried, for she had learned to love the free life, hard as it was, and she could not bear the thought of leaving what was now _home_ to her; but in Connecticut there were better schools, and mother came of gentle stock, and had planned to make a preacher of me. “When the day for leaving came, Johnny Appleseed, who had not left the vicinity of our cabin for weeks, appeared beside my mother in the kitchen; in one hand he held a straight young apple tree, securely packed in moss and sacking for the journey, and in the other a leaf from his Bible, the page of Genesis that tells of the Tree of Life. “‘Take them with you, Hannah, and you will not be lonely,’ he said; ‘where the Tree of Life is there is home, and I give you fresh news of it; soon I shall enter forever into the garden where it grows;’ and before she could answer, he had disappeared among the trees.