THE APPLE. 



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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 confined 

 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 ap- 

 ple, 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 seed- 

 lings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in more favora- 

 ble 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 complexion I ever 

 saw. It is good size, and the color of a tea rose. Its 

 quality is best appreciated in the kitchen. I know an- 

 other 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 

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