THE APPLE. 29 



and the frost, the plow and the priming-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 noi the 

 Frigid Zones. Uncloying fruit, fruit whose hest 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 you. Not spices or olives or the sumptuous 

 liquid fruits, but the grass, the snow, the grains, the 

 coolness is akin to you. 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 tlu 

 bough? The swaar has one look, the ram bo 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-no 

 gilliflower. He goes to the great bin in the cellar 



