in height. In a very few years they will have attained a size sufficient to make them useful as poles.
This quality of rapid growth of the suckers is also a great advantage in the production of nuts. When the trees are cut for lumber, the resulting shoots can be grafted in a year. Fruit can be had as quickly as from the apple tree, or even more quickly in many varieties of chestnuts. I cannot definitely compare the American with the Chinese chestnut, but my experience with molissima shows it also to be a vigorous maker of suckers, and certainly not far behind the American.
The native American chestnut has a delicious flavor, but very little use was made of these nuts, considering the fact that they once grew wild to the extent of millions of bushels scattered over hundreds of thousands of square miles of the eastern United States. The Indians mixed chestnut and acorn meal to make bread baked in cornhusks, but for the European population of this country, the small size of the chestnuts was against them, in addition to the weevil worms. The nuts were a source of income for the Appalachian mountaineer in many sections and for boys on farms from Maine to Georgia. Looking for the beautiful brown nuts under the trees in the woods, on farmsteads and in fence rows is a lure to the hunting instincts of man.
Only a few million pounds were sent to American markets. These nuts were eaten along the street, at Hallowe'en parties, and beside the open fire after supper; perhaps we should not omit their service in school to alleviate for country boys the tedium of lessons. American wild chestnuts were important to the Indian, the squirrel, the opossum, the bear, and the frontiersman's hog; but a century and a quarter after the Declaration of Independence, they rotted by the million bushels in the forests from Vermont to Alabama.
The great drawback of the American chestnut was its small size and the added disadvantage that many nuts stuck fast in the bur and had to be removed by force. These disadvantages helped to make the Indian's corn preferable as the frontiersman's chief crop. For the same reason the large nuts of Europe
