The Apples 



they were a part of both, if he could have analysed his feeling for 

 them. 



While the French in Canada were still planting seeds of their 

 beloved Fameuse apple as their fathers had done before them, 

 noting no change in the character of the fruit except when a tree 

 bore handsomer and fmer-flavoured apples than any tasted 

 before, a strange and interesting story was unfolding itself in the 

 valley of the Ohio River. A picturesque character calling himself 

 Johnnie Apple Seed wandered up and down, with no apparent 

 object in life but to plant apple seeds. Queer as he was, the 

 motive that actuated him was nobly altruistic. He was doing 

 what he could to turn the desert into a garden. He had the 

 strange notion that grafting and pruning trees was a wicked 

 practice. He lived to see his trees in bearing over a vast territory. 

 But it is to be hoped that he never realised to what a degree his 

 philanthropy failed. They were mostly "Apples of Sodom" 

 that came as a harvest. Where he had planted seeds of Baldwins 

 and Greenings and Bellflowers grew trees bearing apples with 

 strange, crabbed looks, mongrels of varying degrees of insipidity. 

 They were largely seedling trees of varieties that did not come 

 true. They stubbornly exemplified the rule of which the Fameuse 

 is an exception. 



Do you know the romance of the Newtown pippin? If 

 you have seen one of these matchless apples and sunk your teeth 

 into its mellow substance I need not tell you of its sprightly 

 flavour, its absolute fulfilment of your ideal of what an apple 

 ought to be. What is its pedigree? 



Two centuries ago a chance seed fell near a swamp on the 

 outskirts of the village of Newtown, Rhode Island. A seedling 

 tree came up, and was ignored, as such trees are, until some vagrant 

 passing by saw and tasted the first apples it bore. And the very 

 golden apples of Hesperides they were for the village and the 

 countryside! Cions of this tree became the parents of great 

 orchards in the Hudson River Valley. Up and down the coast 

 among the colonies they were scattered. 



In the year 1758, Benjamin Franklin, our representative in 

 England, received a box of Newtown pippins, and he gave some 

 to his distinguished friend, Peter Collinson. Thus were American 

 apples introduced with eclat to the attention of the English. 

 The trees did poorly in English orchards, but the fruit in London 



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