Chapter 13

HOUSE-WARMING

In October I went a-graping to the river meadows, and loaded
myself with clusters more precious for their beauty and fragrance
than for food. There, too, I admired, though I did not gather, the
cranberries, small waxen gems, pendants of the meadow grass, pearly
and red, which the farmer plucks with an ugly rake, leaving the
smooth meadow in a snarl, heedlessly measuring them by the bushel
and the dollar only, and sells the spoils of the meads to Boston and
New York; destined to be jammed, to satisfy the tastes of lovers of
Nature there. So butchers rake the tongues of bison out of the
prairie grass, regardless of the torn and drooping plant. The
barberry's brilliant fruit was likewise food for my eyes merely; but
I collected a small store of wild apples for coddling, which the
proprietor and travellers had overlooked. When chestnuts were ripe
I laid up half a bushel for winter. It was very exciting at that
season to roam the then boundless chestnut woods of Lincoln -- they
now sleep their long sleep under the railroad -- with a bag on my
shoulder, and a stick to open burs with in my hand, for I did not
always wait for the frost, amid the rustling of leaves and the loud
reproofs of the red squirrels and the jays, whose half-consumed nuts
I sometimes stole, for the burs which they had selected were sure to
contain sound ones. Occasionally I climbed and shook the trees.
They grew also behind my house, and one large tree, which almost
overshadowed it, was, when in flower, a bouquet which scented the
whole neighborhood, but the squirrels and the jays got most of its
fruit; the last coming in flocks early in the morning and picking
the nuts out of the burs before they fell, I relinquished these
trees to them and visited the more distant woods composed wholly of
chestnut. These nuts, as far as they went, were a good substitute
for bread. Many other substitutes might, perhaps, be found.
Digging one day for fishworms, I discovered the ground-nut (Apios
tuberosa) on its string, the potato of the aborigines, a sort of
fabulous fruit, which I had begun to doubt if I had ever dug and
eaten in childhood, as I had told, and had not dreamed it. I had
often since seen its crumpled red velvety blossom supported by the
stems of other plants without knowing it to be the same.
Cultivation has well-nigh exterminated it. It has a sweetish taste,
much like that of a frost-bitten potato, and I found it better
boiled than roasted. This tuber seemed like a faint promise of
Nature to rear her own children and feed them simply here at some
future period. In these days of fatted cattle and waving
grain-fields this humble root, which was once the totem of an Indian
tribe, is quite forgotten, or known only by