E-text prepared by Lionel Sear
Beside a winding creek of the Lynher River, and not far from the Cornishborough of Saltash, you may find a roofless building so closely backedwith cherry-orchards that the trees seem by their slow pressure to bethrusting the mud-walls down to the river's brink, there to topple andfall into the tide. The old trees, though sheeted with white blossom inthe spring, bear little fruit, and that of so poor a flavour as to bescarcely worth picking. They have, in fact, almost reverted to savagery,even as the cottage itself is crumbling back to the earth out of which itwas built. On the slope above the cherry-orchards, if you moor your boatat the tumble-down quay and climb by half-obliterated pathways, you willcome to a hedge of brambles, and to a broken gate with a well beside it;and beyond the gate to an orchard of apple-trees, planted in times when,regularly as Christmas Eve came round, Aunt Barbree Furnace, her maidSusannah, and the boy Nandy, would mount by this same path with a bowl ofcider, and anoint the stems one by one, reciting—
Here's to thee, good apple-tree—
Pockets full, hats full, great bushel-bags full!
Amen, an' vire off the gun!
—Whereupon Nandy, always after a caution to be extry-careful, would shuthis eyes, pull the trigger of his blunderbuss, and wake all the echoes ofthe creek in an uproar which, as Susannah never failed to remark, was fitto frighten every war-ship down in Hamoaze. The trees, grey with lichen,sprawl as they have fallen under the weight of past crops. They go onblossoming, year after year; even those that lie almost horizontallyremember their due season and burst into blowth, pouring (as it were) inrosy-white cascades down the slope and through the rank grasses.But as often as not the tenant neglects to gather the fruit. Nor is itworth his while to grub up the old roots; for you cannot plant a neworchard where an old one has decayed. One of these days (he tells me) hemeans to do something with the wisht old place: meanwhile I doubt if hesets foot in it once a year.
For me, I find it worth visiting at least twice a year: in spring when thePoet's Narcissus flowers in great clumps under the north hedge, and thecolumbines grow breast-high—pink, blue, and blood-red; and again inautumn, for the sake of an apple which we call the gilly