THE APPLE-TREE

THE OPEN COUNTRY BOOKS

A continuing company of genial little books
about the out-of-doors

Under the editorship of
L. H. BAILEY

Others about weather and the sky, scenery,
camps, recreation, quadrupeds, fishes, birds,
insects, reptiles, plants, and the places in the open.

The Open Country Books—No. 1

THE APPLE-TREE

BY

L. H. BAILEY

NEW YORK
THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1922

All rights reserved

PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

Copyright, 1922,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.

Set up and electrotyped. Published January, 1922.

FERRIS PRINTING COMPANY
NEW YORK

CONTENTS

1. The home apple-tree

THE APPLE-TREE

I

WHERE THERE IS NO APPLE-TREE

The wind is snapping in the bamboos, knocking together the resonant canes and weaving the myriad flexile wreaths above them. The palm heads rustle with a brisk crinkling music. Great ferns stand in the edge of the forest, and giant arums cling their arms about the trunks of trees and rear their dim jacks-in-the-pulpit far in the branches; and in the greater distance I know that green parrots are flying in twos from tree to tree. The plant forms are strange and various, making mosaic of contrasting range of leaf-size and leaf-shape, palm and grass and fern, epiphyte and liana and clumpy mistletoe, of grace and clumsiness and even misproportion, a tall thick landscape all mingled into a symmetry of disorder that charms the attention and fascinates the eye.

It is a soft and delicious air wherein I sit. A torrid drowse is in the receding landscape. The people move leisurely, as befits the world where there is no preparation for frost and no urgent need of laborious apparel. There are tardy bullock-carts, unconscious donkeys, and men pushing vehicles. There are odd