SECRETARY'S PORTFOLIO. 367 



In Canada apples are rarely stored for keeping in house cellars. A special 

 cellar is made, deep, with thick stone walls laid in mortar. These walls rise 

 above the surface only about ten inches, to allow of small windows for ventil- 

 ation and lisht. There is a double floor above filled in with moss or sawdust. 

 This floor is covered by a roof-like attic, and the apples are there kept until 

 the approach of severe frosts, when they are sorted, barreled, and lowered into 

 the cellar through a trap-door, which is then closed and packed in the same 

 way as the floor. At times during the winter when the weather is not freezing 

 this cellar is opened and the fruit removed for sale. When properly made and 

 managed there is little or no loss in the way of storing winter apples. 



ANOTHER VIEW OF STORING. 



A correspondent of the N. Y. Tribune writes as follows: 



Apples never sweat, but moisture condenses on them as dew upon grass. 

 Fruit should be carefully gathered as soon as ripe, when the weather is dry and 

 warm; should never be handled when wet, and must not be bruised nor chafed 

 in the least. The natural waxy secretion found on fruit is a protection against 

 the effects of moisture and air; when the skin is deprived of this protection or 

 is broken by pressure, or even by a puncture of a pin (made in labeling fruit 

 at our fairs, as is often done), the oxygen of the air will gain access to the 

 juices of the fruit, and fermentation and decay will result. Gathered as above 

 described and carried directly to the cellar when the fruit is warm and dry, and 

 packed in barrels or bins, the atmosphere being cool, the vapor in it will not 

 condense and no dew will be seen on the fruit, as will be the case when the 

 apples are cooler than the cellar air. Forty years ago or more I thus stored 

 eight barrels of Eoxbury Russets in my cellar as soon as gathered, and laid the 

 barrels on the bilge, and when opened the 8th of July not an apple was 

 specked, while the remainder, gathered in an ordinary way, barreled and 

 stored in the barn (as was then said " to sweat"), during the changes of heat 

 in November till cold weather, and then stored in cellar, rotted badly by the 

 middle of May. 



FRUIT CURING. 



The California Mountain Messenger reports an interesting experiment in fruit 

 curing lately made at a Placerville foundry. About a peck of sliced apples 

 were placed in a sieve and subjected to a cold air blast for three and a half 

 hours in the cupola furnace of the foundry, and the fruit is reported to have 

 been completely and beautifully cured by the treatment, remaining soft and 

 without the slightest discoloration. The cured fruit showed none of the harsh, 

 stiff dryness which results from hot curing, the cold blast completely freeing 

 the fruit from excess of moisture, with no possibility of burning or shriveling 

 it. The Messenger says : "Compared with our sun drying, it effects a great 

 saving of expense, attention, and risk. Anybody who can command or devise 

 a strong blast of cold air can dry fruit in a superior — we might say perfect — 

 manner, without being dependent on the weather and waiting on the slow pro- 



