know these fruits and make the most of them. Some states or regions have fruits peculiar to themselves. Wouldn't it be worth while for the domestic science or cookery teacher in a country school to show her pupils how to utilize these home products? We hear talk about the cost of materials for use in classes in cookery. To let our wild fruits go to waste is poor economy whichever way we look at it. Wouldn't you, if you live in northern Michigan, like to exchange a pot of thimbleberry jam for one made in North Carolina from persimmons? Or if you live in Montana would you exchange buffalo berry marmalade with a Florida friend for guava jelly or preserved cumquats?

WILD RASPBERRIES

Just the other day a girl from the shore of Lake Superior told me of a camping trip on a part of the lake shore inaccessible except by water. A storm on the lake kept them from going home when they had expected so they gathered raspberries and canned and jammed them till their sugar gave out, then until every available cooking utensil, even the coffee pot, was full and the supply of berries was as unlimited as ever. These great, luscious fruits, she said, were as big as the end of her thumb, and fairly falling off the bushes with the weight of juice.

Doesn't it make your mouth water? The pickers who live near the woods up there bring berries to town in milk pails. The fruit box may be more elegant, but there is a bountiful sound about the milk pail that takes my fancy. Of course, one gets scratched while berry-picking; but in what a good cause. Is there something wrong about boys and girls who prefer boxed berries and smooth hands to wild fruits and scratches? There are thousands of dollars wasted every year that might be working on some boy's or girl's schooling, just because nature's crop of raspberries isn't half harvested.

Wild raspberries should be canned, jellied, or jammed by the regulation methods. With a good oil stove all the work can be done in the open air.

THIMBLEBERRY

Do you know the thimbleberry? Some call it the flowering raspberry. You will know by its shape and general look that it is a cousin to the black raspberry although it is flatter, seedier, and more sharply acid. It grows on a bush or shrub somewhat like a raspberry, but its leaves are broad, like grape leaves. Instead of thorns its twigs are clothed with sticky hairs. The colour of the fruit is pinkish purple.

Thimbleberries grow often along woods margins, just back of the fringe of wild red raspberries. You are lucky if you get two cupfuls of the thimbleberries while your companion is picking two quarts of the raspberries. Yours pack more closely and the fruit is not so abundant.

The number of people who have tasted thimbleberry jam is small. I am told by one who has made it that you can get any price you ask for tiny glasses of it, even a dollar a glass, from people who "must have it." Made just as one does other jams, equal parts of fruit and sugar, there is nothing tastes quite like it.

BLUEBERRIES

Blueberry pie was a staple and justly popular dessert in a certain college dining-room, where I first made its acquaintance. It was, of course, made of canned blueberries, and we used to wonder where they all came from. We certainly never saw them growing in the Mississippi Valley. The blueberry belt is a wide one and includes all the eastern and central states. I first saw them growing on Cape Ann, and later on the New Hampshire hills. The women and children used to bring them in small pails to sell at the doors of their less enterprising neighbours. But the price was always high and the berries not first class, unless we gathered them ourselves. It takes a lot of picking to get two quarts. One gets an entirely wrong impression of the blueberry business from these experiences.

The great canning factories do not depend on a haphazard crop. In New England and the eastern states there are thousands of acres of waste land, shorn of its forest, where blueberries grow in greatest abundance. It is not possible to estimate with any accuracy the value of this wild crop. Pickers get from one and one-half to three cents a quart, and the boxes sell in retail market at from twelve and one-half cents to eighteen cents a box. Northern Michigan shipped five thousand bushels one year. They ship better than softer fruits, but the price is always high and the supply small because the canning factories are near the fields, and shipping is expensive. One large factory uses seven hundred bushels a day. The total product of the Maine canneries ten years ago was worth over one hundred thousand dollars. That must be where our college cook got her supply.

Huckleberry and blueberry are the names used most commonly and you will meet people who know one from the other. But as both are blue and there are high bush and low bush huckleberries, as well as high and low bush blueberries, it is useless to discuss the names. Both are right and a huckleberry in Ohio may be a blueberry in Maine.

A sort of rake to gather blueberries is used for the low bushes. But hand picking is best. The rake tears the bushes so, and the berries have to be put through a fanning mill twice to free them from leaves and rubbish. This process fits them for the canners who are not as particular as we wish they were.

The blueberry bush is a kind of Indian. It does not take kindly to gardens and other civilized places. It thrives and yields abundantly if given a chance on its native hillsides, and comes up by the million wherever the cutting of the timber lets in the light. By burning over the blueberry land in very early spring while the ground is wet, those in charge can keep down the alder, poplars, birches, and other non-money-making growths, and this is taken by the blueberries as their chance. They come right up, and deliver a tremendous crop the first year after the burning.

WILD GRAPES

We used to gather wild grapes along the river bottoms in the middle West when we went nutting. Sometimes our nutting excursion turned out to be a grape harvest. These grapes were small, almost black under their thin coat of bloom, in clusters like miniature garden grapes. Oh, but they were puckery when green, but the frost sweetened them. The vines grew tremendously, way to the tops of the trees, their stems like great ropes, which we used for swings. The grapes were really mostly seed and skin, but there was juice enough to stain our aprons, and give the teeth and tongue an unmistakable telltale hue. There was juice enough for a kind of jelly which I believe had the peculiarity of never "jelling" properly. It is good, though, and they were well worth the sugar to make them edible.

I was surprised at their size when I first saw the big summer grapes of the eastern hedge-rows and banks. But their flavour is no great improvement over that of the frost grape. There is more pulp, though. My barberry gathering friend, who admits that she is "fond of all sorts of woodland flavours," gathers these grapes in August before they begin to change colour. She makes the only really green grape jelly I have seen. This is her receipt:

Wash the stemmed grapes very carefully to rid them of dust and possible taint from poison ivy, with which they often associate. Put them into a preserving kettle with a very little boiling water, cover and let them steam till tender. (No boiling here.) Strain to get rid of seeds and skins. (Work fast at this point, because delay may cause the change of colour we wish to avoid.) Weigh the juice and an equal amount of white sugar. Heat sugar and juice separately, without scorching.