No More Learning

By the middle of July, green apples are so large as to remind us of
coddling, and of the autumn. The sward is commonly strewed with little
ones which fall stillborn, as it were,--Nature thus thinning them for
us. The Roman writer Palladius said, "If apples are inclined to fall
before their time, a stone placed in a split root will retain them. "
Some such notion, still surviving, may account for some of the stones
which we see placed, to be overgrown, in the forks of trees. They have
a saying in Suffolk, England,--

"At Michaelmas time, or a little before,
Half an apple goes to the core. "

Early apples begin to be ripe about the first of August; but I think
that none of them are so good to eat as some to smell. One is worth
more to scent your handkerchief with than any perfume which they sell
in the shops. The fragrance of some fruits is not to be forgotten,
along with that of flowers. Some gnarly apple which I pick up in the
road reminds me by its fragrance of all the wealth of Pomona,--carrying
me forward to those days when they will be collected in golden and
ruddy heaps in the orchards and about the cider-mills.

A week or two later, as you are going by orchards or gardens,
especially in the evenings, you pass through a little region possessed
by the fragrance of ripe apples, and thus enjoy them without price,
and without robbing anybody.

There is thus about all natural products a certain volatile and
ethereal quality which represents their highest value, and which
cannot be vulgarized, or bought and sold. No mortal has ever enjoyed
the perfect flavor of any fruit, and only the godlike among men begin
to taste its ambrosial qualities. For nectar and ambrosia are only
those fine flavors of every earthly fruit which our coarse palates
fail to perceive,--just as we occupy the heaven of the gods without
knowing it. When I see a particularly mean man carrying a load of fair
and fragrant early apples to market, I seem to see a contest going on
between him and his horse, on the one side, and the apples on the
other, and, to my mind, the apples always gain it. Pliny says that
apples are the heaviest of all things, and that the oxen begin to
sweat at the mere sight of a load of them.
Our driver begins to lose
his load the moment he tries to transport them to where they do not
belong, that is, to any but the most beautiful. Though he gets out
from time to time, and feels of them, and thinks they are all there, I
see the stream of their evanescent and celestial qualities going to
heaven from his cart, while the pulp and skin and core only are going
to market. They are not apples, but pomace. Are not these still
Iduna's apples, the taste of which keeps the gods forever young? and
think you that they will let Loki or Thjassi carry them off to
Jotunheim, while they grow wrinkled and gray? No, for Ragnarok, or the
destruction of the gods, is not yet.

There is another thinning of the fruit, commonly near the end of
August or in September, when the ground is strewn with windfalls; and
this happens especially when high winds occur after rain. In some
orchards you may see fully three quarters of the whole crop on the
ground, lying in a circular form beneath the trees, yet hard and
green, or, if it is a hillside, rolled far down the hill. However, it
is an ill wind that blows nobody any good. All the country over,
people are busy picking up the windfalls, and this will make them
cheap for early apple pies.

In October, the leaves falling, the apples are more distinct on the
trees. I saw one year in a neighboring town some trees fuller of fruit
than I remember to have ever seen before, small yellow apples hanging
over the road. The branches were gracefully drooping with their
weight, like a barberry bush, so that the whole tree acquired a new
character. Even the topmost branches, instead of standing erect,
spread and drooped in all directions; and there were so many poles
supporting the lower ones that they looked like pictures of banyan
trees. As an old English manuscript says, "The mo appelen the tree
bereth the more sche boweth to the folk. "

Surely the apple is the noblest of fruits.