In the light and colour and brilliance of an English summer we sometimes seem very near those tropical lands.
So still was it that we heard an apple fall in the orchard, thud on the sward, blighted perhaps and ripe before its time.

Under the trees as the months went on there would rise heaps of the windfalls collected there to wait for the cider-mill.

The mill was the property of two or three of the village folk, a small band of adventurers now grown old, who every autumn went round from farm to farm grinding the produce of the various orchards.

They sometimes poured a quantity of the acid juice into the mill to sharpen it, as cutting a lemon will sharpen a knife.

The great press, with its unwieldy screw and levers, squeezed the liquor from the cut-up apples in the horse-hair bags: a cumbersome apparatus, but not without interest; for surely so rude an engine must date back far in the past.