country, known as “apple-cuts,” now, alas! nearly obsolete, where so many things were cut and dried besides apples!  The larger and more loaded the orchard, the more frequently the invitations went round and the higher the social and convivial spirit ran.  Ours is eminently a country of the orchard.  Horace Greeley said he had seen no land in which the orchard formed such a prominent feature in the rural and agricultural districts.  Nearly every farmhouse in the Eastern and Northern States has its setting or its background of apple-trees, which generally date back to the first settlement of the farm.  Indeed, the orchard, more than almost any other thing, tends to soften and humanize the country, and to give the place of which it is an adjunct a settled, domestic look.  The apple-tree takes the rawness and wildness off any scene.  On the top of a mountain, or in remote pastures, it sheds the sentiment of home.  It never loses its domestic air, or lapses into a wild state.  And in planting a homestead, or in choosing a building-site for the new house, what a help it is to have a few old, maternal apple-trees near by,—­regular old grandmothers, who have seen trouble, who have been sad and glad through so many winters and summers, who have blossomed till the air about them is sweeter than elsewhere, and borne fruit till the grass beneath them has become thick and soft from human contact, and who have nourisbed robins and finches in their branches till they have a tender, brooding look!  The ground, the turf, the atmosphere of an old orchard, seem several stages nearer to man than that of the adjoining field, as if the trees had given back to the soil more than they had taken from it; as if they had tempered the elements, and attracted all the genial and beneficent influences in the landscape around.

An apple orchard is sure to bear you several crops beside the apple.  There is the crop of sweet and tender reminiscences, dating from childhood and spanning the seasons from May to October, and making the orchard a sort of outlying part of the household.  You have played there as a child, mused there as a youth or lover, strolled there as a thoughtful, sad-eyed man.  Your father, perhaps, planted the trees, or reared them from the seed, and you yourself have pruned and grafted them, and worked among them, till every separate tree has a peculiar history and meaning in your mind.  Then there is the never-failing crop of birds,—­robins, goldfinches, kingbirds, cedar-birds, hairbirds, orioles, starlings,—­all nesting and breeding in its branches, and fitly described by Wilson Flagg as “Birds of the Garden and Orchard.”  Whether the pippin and sweet bough bear or not, the “punctual birds” can always be depended on.  Indeed, there are few better places to study ornithology than in the orchard.  Besides its regular occupants, many of the birds of the deeper forest find occasion to visit it during the season.  The cuckoo comes for the tent-caterpillar, the jay