Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III AN OLD APPLE TREE BEYOND the meadow, perhaps half a mile from my window, stands an old apple tree, the last of an ancient line that once marked the boundary between the " upper " and the " lower" pastures. It is a bent, broken, hoary old tree, grizzled with suckers from feet to crown. No one has pruned it for half a century ; no one ever gathers its gnarly apples — no one but the cattle who love to lie in its shadow and munch its fruit. The cows know the tree. One of their winding paths runs under its low-hung branches; and as I frequently travel the cow-paths, I also find my way thither. Yet I do not go for apples, nor just because the cow-path takes me. That old apple tree is hollow, hollow all over, trunk and branches, as hollow as a lodging-house; and I have never known it when it was not " putting up " some wayfaring visitor or some permanent lodger. So I go over, whenever 1 have a chance, to call upon my friends or pay my respects to the distinguished guests. This old tree is on the neighboring farm. It does not belong to me, and I am glad; for if it did, then I should have to trim it, and scrape it, and plasterup its holes, and put a burlap petticoat on it, all because of the gruesome gypsy moths that infest my trees. Oh, yes, that would make it bear better apples, but what then would become of its birds and beasts? Everybody ought to have one apple tree that bears birds and beasts — and Baldwin apples, too, of course, if the three sorts of fruit can be made to grow on the same tree. But only the birds and beasts grow well on the untrimmed, unscraped, unplastered, unpetticoated old tree yonder between the pastures. His heart is wide open to every small traveler passing by. Whenever I look over toward the old tree, I think of the old vine-covered, ...