THE APPLE. 119 



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 toward the cold ; bracing, 

 sub-acid, active fruit. I think you must come from the 

 north, you are so frank and honest, so sturdy and ap- 

 petizing. You are stocky and homely like the northern 

 races. Your quality is Saxon. Surely the fiery and im- 

 petuous 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 intemperate or an ignoble thought, never be 

 feverish or despondent. 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 New- 



