Music Welcome. Welcome to Snewscast. The podcast is on to help you fall asleep. Find us on Snewscast.com and follow us on social media and wherever you listen to podcasts. If you enjoy our show. please write a review on the podcast's app. Also, share us with a friend. This episode is brought to you by ancient apple orchards. Tonight, we'll read a chapter titled, An Old Road from a Rambler's Lease by Bradford Torrey, published in 1892. Torrey was an American ornithologist. He also edited a book of the Rose Journal writings. He wrote a preface to Rambler's lease paraphrase to his followers. The writer of this little book has found so much pleasure in other men's woods and fields that he has come to look upon himself as in some sort the owner of them. Their lawful possessors will not begrudge him this feeling, he believes. Nor take it a miss if he assumes, even in this public way, to hold a rambler's lease of their property. private opinion is that the world belongs to those who enjoy it. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body into the softness of your bed. Now, take a few deep breaths. Old Road. Me thinks here one may, without much molestation, be thinking what he is, when he came, what he has done, and to what the king has called him. Bunyun. I've fallen with persons now and then, who profess to care nothing for a path when walking in the woods. They do not choose to travel in other people's footsteps, nay, nor even in their own, but count it their mission to lay out a new road every time they go afield. They are welcome to their freak. My own genius for adventure is less highly developed. And, to be frank, I have never learned to look upon affection and whim, a synonymous with originality. In my eyes, it is nothing against a hill that other men have climbed it before me, and if their feet have worn a trail so much the better. I not only reach the summit more easily, but have company on the way. Company nonetheless, to my mind, perhaps, for being silent and invisible. It is well enough to strike into the trackless forest once in a while, to wander, you know, not wither, and come out, you know, not wear, to lie down in a strange place. And for an hour, imagine yourself the explorer of a new continent. But if the mind be awake, as alas, too often it is not, you may walk where you will, in never so well known a corner, and you will see new things, and think new thoughts, and return to your house a new man, which I venture to believe, is after all the main consideration. Indeed, if your stirring abroad is to be more than mere muscular exercise, you will find positive advantage in making use of some well-worn and familiar path. The feet will follow it mechanically, and so the mind, that is, the walker himself will be left undistracted. That, to my thinking, is the real tour of discovery, wherein one keeps to the bee in road, looks at the customary sights, but brings home a new idea. There are inward moods, as well as outward conditions, in which an old, half disused, bush-bordered road becomes the saunter's paradise. I have several such in my eye at this moment, but especially one in which my feet, years ago, grew to feel at home. It is an an almost, loitering place, or would be if only it were somewhat longer. How many hundreds of times have I traveled it? Spring and summer, autumn and winter? As I go over it now, the days of my youth come back to me. Clothed all of them in that soft, light, which nothing but distance can bestow, whether upon hills or days. This gracious effect is heightened, no doubt, by the fact that for a good while past my visits to the place have been only occasional. Memory and imagination are true yoke fellows, and between them are always preparing some new pleasure for us, as often as we allow them opportunity. The other day, for instance, as I came to the top of the hill just beyond the river, I turned suddenly to the right, looking for an old pear tree. I had not thought of it for years. In the more I have tried to recall its appearance and exact whereabouts, the less confident have I grown that it ever had any material existence. But somehow, just at that moment my mouth seemed to recollect it. And in general, I have come to put faith in such involuntary, and if I may say so, sensible joggings of the memory. I wonder whether the tree ever was there, or anywhere. At all events, the thought of it gave me for the moment a pleasure more real than any taste in the mouth, weren't ever so sweet. Thank fortune, imaginative delights are as far as possible from being imaginary. The river just mentioned runs under the road, and, as will readily be inferred, is one of its foremost attractions. I speak of it as a river with some misgivings. It is a rather large brook, or a very small river, but a man who has never been able to leap across it has perhaps no right to deny it the more honorable name. Its source is a spacious and beautiful sheet of water, which here has been known as a pond, but which I should be glad to believe would hereafter be put upon the maps as lake Wisegassad. This brook or river, call it whichever you please, goes meandering through the township in a northeasterly direction, turning the wheels of half a dozen mills, more or less on its way. A sluggish stream, too lazy to work, you would think, passing much of its time in flat, grassy meadows, where it idles along as if it realized that the end of its course was near and felt in no haste to lose itself in the salt sea. Out of this stream, I pulled goodly numbers of perch, pickerull, shiners, flatfish, and hornpouts. While I was still careless-hearted enough, heaven lies about us in our infancy, to enjoy this very amiable and semi-religious form of sport. And as the river intersects at least seven roads that come within my boyish beat. I must have crossed it thousands of times, in addition to which I have spent days in paddling and bathing in it. Altogether it is one of my most familiar friends, and what one can say of all familiar friends. I do not remember that it ever served me the slightest ill turn. It passes under the road of which I am now discoursing in a double channel. The bridge being supported midway by a stone wall and then broadens out into an artificial shallow through through which travelers may drive as they will to let their horses drink out of the stream. First and last, I have improved many a shining hour on this bridge, leaning industriously over the railing. I can see the rocky bed at this moment. Yes, and the very shape and position of some of the stones as I saw them thirty years ago, especially of one, on which we used to balance ourselves to dip up the water or to peer under the bridge. In those days, if we essayed to be uncommonly adventurous, we waited through this low and somewhat dark passage, a gruesome proceeding. As we were compelled to stoop a little, short as we wore to save our heads, While the road to our imagination seemed in momentary danger of caving in upon us. Courage, like all other human virtues, is better relative, attribute. Possibly the heroic deeds upon which in our grown-up estate, we plume ourselves are not greatly more meritorious or wonderful than more some of the childish ventures at the recollection of which we now condescended to feel amused. On the surface of the brook flourished two kinds of insects whose manner of life we never tired of watching. One sort had long, wide spreading legs, and bias were known as skaters. From their movements to this day I blushed to confess I have no other name for them. The others were flat, shining, or bicular, or oblong, lead-colored bugs, lucky bugs, I have heard them called. And lay flat upon the water, as if quite without limbs. But they darted over the brook, and even against the current, with noticeable activity, and doubtless were well supplied with battles. Once in a while, we saw a fish here, but only on rare occasions. The great unfailing attraction of the place, then as now, was the flowing water, forever spending, and never spent. The insects lived upon it. Apparently they had no power to leave it for an instant, but they were not carried away by it. Happy creatures. We, alas, sporting upon the river of time, can neither dive below the surface, nor mount into the ether. And unlike the insects, lucky bugs indeed, we have no option but to move with the tide. We have less liberty than the green flags, even which grow and scattered tuffs in the bed of the brook, whose leaves point forever downstream, like so many index fingers, as if they said, yes, yes, that is the way to the sea. That is the way we all must go. While for themselves, nevertheless, they managed to hold on by their roots, victorious, even while professing to yield. To my mind, the river is alive. Reason about it as I will, I never can make it otherwise. I could sooner believe in water nymphs than in many existences which are commonly treated as much more certain matters of fact. I could believe in them, I say, but in reality I do not. My communings are not with any haunter of the river, but with the living soul of the river itself. It lags under the vine covered all-dors, hastens through the bridge, then slips carelessly down a little descent, where it breaks into singing, then into a mill pond, and out again, and so on, and so on on through one experience after another and all the time

it is not dead water but a river a thing of life and motion. After all it is not for me to say

what is alive and what dead as yet indeed I do not know so much as know what life is.

In certain moods, in what I fondly call my better moments, I feel measurably sure of being alive

myself. But even on that point, for ought I can tell, the brook may entertain some private doubts. Just beyond the bridge is an ancient apple orchard. This was already falling into decay when I was a boy, and the many years that have elapsed since then have nearly completed its demolition. Although I dare say the present generation of schoolboys still find it worthwhile to clamber over the wall as they journey back and forth. Probably, it will be no surprise to the owner of the place if I tell him that before I was twelve years old, I knew the taste of all his apples. In fact, the orchard was so sequestered, so remote from any house, especially from its proprietors, that it hardly seemed a sin to rob it. It was not so much an orchard as a bit of woodland.

And besides, we never shook the trees, but only helped ourselves to windfalls. And it must be a severe moralist who calls that stealing. Why should the fruit drop off, if not to be picked up?

In my time, at all events, such appropriations were never accounted robbery, though the providential absence of the owner was unquestionably a thing to be thankful for. He would never begrudge us, the apples, of course, for he was rich and generous, but it was quite as well for him to be somewhere else, all we were gathering up these favors, which the winds of heaven had shaken down for our benefit. There is something of the special pleader in most of us. It is to be feared, whether young or old. If we are put to it, we can draw a very fine distinction in our own in favor, no matter how obtuse we may seem, on ordinary occasions. Remembering how voracious and undiscriminating my juvenile appetite was, I cannot help wondering that I am still alive. A feeling which I doubt not is shared by many a man who, like myself, had a country bringing up. We must have been born with something more than a spark of life. I'll sit with certainly have been smothered long ago by the fuel so recklessly heaped upon it. But we lived out of doors. Took abundant exercise. We're not studious over much, as all boys and girls are charged with being nowadays, and have little to worry about, which may go far to explain the mystery. It provokes a smile to reckon upon the many places along this old road that are connected in my mind with the question of something to eat. At the foot of the orchard, just now spoken of, for example, is a dilapidated stone wall between it and the river. Over this, as well as over the bushes beside it, straggled a small wild grapevine bearing every year a scanty crop of white grapes. These, to our unsophisticated palettes, were delicious, if only they got ripe. That was the rub, and as a rule, we gathered our share of them, which was all their were, while they were yet several stages short of that desirable consummation, Not deeming it prudent to leave them longer, less some hunger-earth soul should get the start of us. Graping, as we called it, was one of our regular autumn industries, and there were a few vines within the circle, which we did not feel our fingers tugging at them at least once a year. Some of them hung well over the river. Others took refuge in the tops of trees, but by hook or by crook we usually got the better. No doubt the fruit was all bad enough, but some of it was sweeter or less sour than other. Perhaps the best vine was one that covered a certain superannuated apple tree half a mile west of our riverside orchard before mentioned. Here, I might have been seen by the hour, eagerly, yet cautiously venturing out upon the decayed and doubtful limbs, in quest of this or that peculiarly tempting bunch. These grapes were purple. how well some things are remembered, and were sweeter than Isabella's, or Cadwabas are now, such as the degeneracy of vines in these modern days. All together more important than the grapes were the Huckleberries, for which also we four times out of five took this same famous by-road. Speaking roughly, I may say that we depended upon seven pastures for our supplies, and were accustomed to visit them in something like regular order. It is kindly provided that Huckleberry bushes have an exceptionally strong tendency to vary. We possessed no theories upon the subject, and knew nothing of disputed questions about species and varieties, but we were not without a good degree of practical information. Here was a bunch of bushes, for instance, covered with black, shiny, pear-shaped berries, very numerous, but very small. They would do moderately well in default of better. Another patch, perhaps, but a few rods removed, for large, globular berries, less glossy than the others, but still black. These, as we expressed it, filled up much faster than the others, they're not nearly so thick. Blue berries, not blueberries, but blue huckleberries, were common enough, and we knew one small cluster of plants, the fruit of which was white, a variety that I have since found noted by Dr. Gray as very rare. Unhappily this freak made so little impression upon me as a boy that while I am clear as to the fact

and feel sure of the pasture, I have no distinct recollection of the exact spot where the eccentric bushes grew. I should like to know whether they still persist. Grey's manual, by the way, makes no mention of the blue veronities, but lays it down succinctly that the fruit is black. The difference, we cared most about, however, related not to color, shape, or size, but to the time of ripening. Diversity of habit in this regard was indeed a great piece of good fortune. Not to be rightly appreciated, without horrible imaginings, of how short the season of berry pies and pudding would be if all the berries matured at once. You may be sure we never forgot where the early sorts were to be found and where the late. What hours upon hours we spent in the broiling sun picking into some some half-paint vessel, and emptying that into a larger receptacle, safely stowed away under some cedar tree or barberry bush. How proud we were of our heaped-up pales, how carefully we discarded from the top, every half ripe or otherwise imperfect specimen. So early, Dewell taught Yankee children to develop one qualification. The Sun had certain minor errands to look after, we might have admitted, even in those mid-summer days. But his principal business was to ripen aquabaries. So it seemed then, and now, well, men are but children still, and for them too, their own little round is the center of the world. All these pastures had names of course, well understood by us children. Though, I am not sure how generally they would have been recognized by the townspeople. first in order was River Pasteur, the owner of which turned his cattle into it, and every few years, moaned the bushes, went the result that the berries, whenever there were any, were uncommonly in handsome, not far beyond this, the entrance was through a pair of bars besides a spreading white oak, was millstone pasture. This was a large, struggling place, half pasture, half wood, full of nooks and corners, with by paths running hither and dither, and named after two large boulders, which lay one on top of the other. We used to clamber upon these to eat our lunch, thinking within ourselves meanwhile that we must have great strength. At that time, though I scarcely know how to own it. Glacial action was a thing by us unheard of. Where wise are now on that point at any rate? Two of the other pastures were called respectively after the railroad and a big pine tree. There was a big pine tree. Yn yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n yw'n y