these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to
gather,--wild flavors of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting. The farmer
thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken, unless he
has a walker's appetite and imagination, neither of which can he have.

Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of November, I
presume that the owner does not mean to gather. They belong to children
as wild as themselves,--to certain active boys that I know,--to the
wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes amiss, who gleans
after all the world,--and, moreover, to us walkers. We have met with
them, and they are ours. These rights, long enough insisted upon, have
come to be an institution in some old countries, where they have learned
how to live. I hear that "the custom of grippling, which may be called
apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly, practised in Herefordshire. It
consists in leaving a few apples, which are called the gripples, on
every tree, after the general gathering, for the boys, who go with
climbing-poles and bags to collect them."

As for those I speak of, I pluck them as a wild fruit, native to this
quarter of the earth,--fruit of old trees that have been dying ever
since I was a boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the
woodpecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, who has not
faith enough to look under their boughs. From the appearance of the
tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect nothing but lichens to
drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground strewn
with spirited fruit,--some of it, perhaps, collected at squirrel-holes,
with the marks of their teeth by which they carried them,--some
containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and some,
especially in damp days, a shelless snail. The very sticks and stones
lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the savoriness of the