May with its wealth of resurrecting life, its birds' songs, its flowers uplifting glad heads, is a beautiful month in Dorset; but cider-making time, when the trees put on a blaze of yellow and red and the spirit of serenity and peace broods over everything, is the period that the true son of Dorset loves best. Cider-makin' time--what a phrase! What memories! Why, then, time does indeed blot and blur the golden days of youth! I had almost forgotten the sweet smell of pomace and the cider mill--things which loomed large in the days when I was a boy down Devon way. It is middle age, which Stevenson likened to the "bear's hug of custom squeezing the life out of a man's soul," that has robbed me of the power to conjure up those happy days from the depths of my consciousness. Certainly some virtue within me has departed--what? Well, I do not know, but I cannot recapture the delirious joy of the apple harvest in the West. It is only a memory. Perhaps it is one of those things which will return unexpectedly, and by which I shall remember the world at the last. Well, then, when I was a boy, cider brewing in Hovey's barn was one of the joys of life. A steam-engine on four wheels arrived from Exeter, and pulleys and beltings were fixed up to work the old-fashioned press. Within the barn a rumbling machine crushed the apples (which had been growing mellow in the loft for a fortnight), and the press noisily descended on the racks of pulp and sent the liquid into the tubs with a swish like the fall of tropical rain. Outside the still October air was broken only by the chug--chug--chug of the stationary engine and the mellow voices and laughter of the farmers who delivered their apples and received in exchange barrels of cider. The marc from the cider-press was sometimes fed to cattle combined with bran, hay and chaff. But I suppose that was an old-fashioned idea, and farmers to-day would ridicule such a thing. But Farmer Hovey was a keen-eyed man of business--a man who could farm his acres successfully in the face of any disaster. How I wish that, now grown up, I could re-open those records, the book of his memory! But it has long been closed, laid away in the tree-shaded churchyard in Fore Street, near a flat stone commemorating John Starre: JOHN STARRE. Starre on Hie Where should a Starre be But on Hie? Tho underneath He now doth lie Sleeping in Dust Yet shall he rise More glorious than The Starres in skies. 1633.