Four ---- Being regularly clipped all around each year by the cows, as a hedge with shears, they are often of a perfect conical or pyramidal form, from one to four feet high, and more or less sharp, as if trimmed by the gardener's art. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue-Pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance. But after the third or fourth freezing and thawing they will not be found so good. I have heard of an orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side, and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider. Five ---- Between the fifth and twentieth of October I see the barrels lie under the trees. If I am sharp-set, for I do not refuse the Blue-Pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as I retrace my steps in the frosty eve, being perhaps four or five miles from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep my balance. Six ---- Whole flocks perch in them at night, and I have seen three robins' nests in one which was six feet in diameter. Eight ---- Nevertheless I succeeded in finding it about eight miles west of the Falls; touched it and smelled it, and secured a lingering corymb of flowers for my herbarium. Twelve ---- I counted the annual rings of some which were just one foot high, and as wide as high, and found that they were about twelve years old, but quite sound and thrifty! JOEL, chapter i., verses 1 — 12. Fourteen ---- In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. Fifteen ---- says that its ordinary height “is fifteen or eighteen feet, but it is sometimes found twenty-five or thirty feet high,” and that the large ones “exactly resemble the common apple-tree.” Seventeen ---- Evelyn (An English writer of the seventeenth century). Eighteen ---- says that its ordinary height “is fifteen or eighteen feet, but it is sometimes found twenty-five or thirty feet high,” and that the large ones “exactly resemble the common apple-tree.” Twenty ---- Between the fifth and twentieth of October I see the barrels lie under the tr.

Numbers in Wild Apples by Henry David Thoreau

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