38 THE APPLE. 
In this casket Pomona has put her highest flavors. It 
can stand the ordeal of cooking and still remain a 
spitz. I recently saw a barrel of these apples from 
the orchard of a fruit-grower in the northern part of 
New York, who has devoted especial attention to this 
variety. They were perfect gems. Not large, that 
had not been the aim, but small, fair, uniform, and 
red to the core. How intense, how spicy and aromatic! 
But all the excellences of the apple are not con- 
fined to the cultivated fruit. Occasionally a seedling 
springs up about the farm that produces fruit of rare 
beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted to 
the apple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River, 
I have noticed that most of the wild unbidden trees 
bear good, edible fruit. In cold and ungenial districts, 
the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in 
more favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet. 
I know wild apples that ripen in August, and that do 
not need, if it could be had, Thoreau’s sauce of sharp 
November air to be eaten with. At the foot of a hill 
near me and striking its roots deep in the shale, is a 
giant specimen of native tree that bears an apple that 
has about the clearest, waxiest, most transparent com- 
plexion I ever saw. It is good size, and the color of 
a tea-rose. Its quality is best appreciated in the 
kitchen. I know another seedling of excellent quality 
and so remarkable for its firmness and density, that 
it is known on the farm where it grows as the “heavy 
apple.” 
I have alluded to Thoreau, to whom all lovers of 
the apple and its tree are under obligation. His 
chapter on Wild Apples is a most delicious piece of 
writing. It has a “tang and smack” like the fruit it 
celebrates, and is dashed and streaked with color in 

