No More Learning

Though
somewhat small, it may prove equal, if not superior, in flavor to that
which has grown in a garden,--will perchance be all the sweeter and
more palatable for the very difficulties it has had to contend with.
Who knows but this chance wild fruit, planted by a cow or a bird on
some remote and rocky hillside, where it is as yet unobserved by man,
may be the choicest of all its kind, and foreign potentates shall hear
of it, and royal societies seek to propagate it, though the virtues of
the perhaps truly crabbed owner of the soil may never be heard of,--at
least, beyond the limits of his village? It was thus the Porter and
the Baldwin grew.

Every wild apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every
wild child. It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise. What a lesson to
man! So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the
celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by
fate; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself
and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its
perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth. Poets and philosophers and
statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the
hosts of unoriginal men.

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge. The celestial fruits, the
golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed
dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck
them.

This is one, and the most remarkable way in which the wild apple is
propagated; but commonly it springs up at wide intervals in woods and
swamp, and by the sides of roads, as the soil may suit it, and grows
with comparative rapidity. Those which grow in dense woods are very
tall and slender. I frequently pluck from these trees a perfectly
mild and tamed fruit. As Palladius says, "_Et injussu consternitur
ubere mali_:" And the ground is strewn with the fruit of an unbidden
apple tree.

It is an old notion that, if these wild trees do not bear a valuable
fruit of their own, they are the best stocks by which to transmit to
posterity the most highly prized qualities of others.
However, I am
not in search of stocks, but the wild fruit itself, whose fierce gust
has suffered no "inteneration. " It is not my

"highest plot
To plant the Bergamot. "


THE FRUIT, AND ITS FLAVOR

The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of
November. They then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they
are still perhaps as beautiful as ever. I make a great account of
these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to
gather,--wild flavors of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting. The
farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken,
unless he has a walker's appetite and imagination, neither of which
can he have.

Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of November,
I presume that the owner does not mean to gather. They belong to
children as wild as themselves,--to certain active boys that I
know,--to the wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes
amiss, who gleans after all the world, and, moreover, to us walkers.
We have met with them, and they are ours. These rights, long enough
insisted upon, have come to be an institution in some old countries,
where they have learned how to live. I hear that "the custom of
grippling, which may be called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly,
practiced in Herefordshire. It consists in leaving a few apples, which
are called the gripples, on every tree, after the general gathering,
for the boys, who go with climbing-poles and bags to collect them. "

As for those I speak of, I pluck them as a wild fruit, native to this
quarter of the earth,--fruit of old trees that have been dying ever
since I was a boy and are not yet dead, frequented only by the
woodpecker and the squirrel, deserted now by the owner, who has not
faith enough to look under their boughs. From the appearance of the
tree-top, at a little distance, you would expect nothing but lichens
to drop from it, but your faith is rewarded by finding the ground
strewn with spirited fruit,--some of it, perhaps, collected at
squirrel-holes, with the marks of their teeth by which they carried
them,--some containing a cricket or two silently feeding within, and
some, especially in damp days, a shell-less snail. The very sticks and
stones lodged in the tree-top might have convinced you of the
savoriness of the fruit which has been so eagerly sought after in past
years.

I have seen no account of these among the "Fruits and Fruit-Trees of
America," though they are more memorable to my taste than the grafted
kinds; more racy and wild American flavors do they possess when
October and November, when December and January, and perhaps February
and March even, have assuaged them somewhat.