ean 
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THE APPLE. 29 
and the frost, the plow and the pruning-knife, you 
are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerful industry, and 
a healthy life in the open air. Temperate, chaste 
fruit! you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither 
satiety nor indolence, neither enervating heats nor the 
Frigid Zones. Uncloying fruit, fruit whose best sauce 
is the open air, whose finest flavors only he whose 
taste is sharpened by brisk work or walking knows ; 
winter fruit, when the fire of life burns brightest ; 
fruit always a little hyperborean, leaning towards the 
cold; bracing, sub-acid, active fruit. I think you 
must come from the north, you are so frank and hon- 
est, so sturdy and appetizing. You are stocky and 
homely like the northern races. Your quality is 
Saxon. Surely the fiery and impetuous south is not 
akin to thee. Not spices or olives or the sumptuous 
liquid fruits, but the grass, the snow, the grains, the 
coolness is akin to thee. I think if I could subsist on 
you or the like of you, I should never have an intem- 
perate or ignoble thought, never be feverish or de- 
spondent. So far as I could absorb or transmute 
your quality I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, 
sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmth 
and contentment around. 
Is there any other fruit that has so much facial ex- 
pression as the apple? What boy does not more than 
half believe they can see with that single eye of 
theirs? Do they not look and nod to him from the 
bough? The swaar has one look, the rambo another, 
the spy another. The youth recognizes the seek-no- 
further buried beneath a dozen other varieties, the 
moment he catches a glance of its eye, or the bonny- 
cheeked Newtown pippin, or the gentle but sharp-nosed 
gilliflower. He goes to the great bin in the cellar 
