I remember feeling a certain faint sense of repugnance to engaging in a hunt for Catherine's apple preserve; but I followed Tom around the wood-shed, past a corn-crib, and then around to the north side of the barn. "Now sneak along beside the stone wall here," said Tom. "Keep down. Don't get in sight." We crawled along in cover of the stone wall and came down opposite the garden and orchard. Tom then peeped stealthily over. "There she is!" he whispered, "right out there by the Isabella grape trellis; keep still now, she's going back to the house. We'll find her hoard." We searched about the grape trellis and over the entire garden for ten minutes or more, but found no secret preserve of apples. As we returned to the wood-shed, Kate came out, smiling disdainfully. "Found it?" she asked us,--a question which I felt to be an embarrassing one. With an air of triumph, she then displayed a fine yellow Sweet Harvey. "Oh, don't you think you are cunning?" muttered Tom. "But I'll find your hoard all the same." "Let me know when you do," replied Kate, with a provoking laugh. "Oh, you'll know when I find it," said Tom. "I'll take what there is in it. That was all a blind--her going out to the grape-vine," he remarked to me, as Kate turned away about her work. "She went down there on purpose to fool us, and get us to hunt there for nothing." I went home quite fully informed in regard to the ethics of apple-hoards. The code was simple; it consisted in keeping one's own hoard undiscovered, and in finding and robbing those of others. "Have you got an apple-hoard?" I asked Addison, as soon as I reached home. For all reply, he winked his left eye to me. "Doad's got one, too," he said, after I had had time to comprehend his stealth. "You didn't tell me," I remarked. Addison laughed. "That would be great strategy!" he observed, derisively, "to tell of it! But I only made mine day before yesterday. I thought the early apples were beginning to get good enough to have a hoard. I want to get a big stock on hand for September town-meeting," he added. "I mean to carry a bushel or two, and peddle them out for a cent apiece. The Old Squire put me up to that last year, and I made two dollars and ninety cents. That's better than nothing." "Are you really contented here? Are you homesick, ever?" I asked him.