No More Learning

Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite
unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while
sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them,--for they are extremely
sensitive to its rays,--are found to be filled with a rich, sweet
cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I
am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this
state, and your jaws are the cider-press. Others, which have more
substance, are a sweet and luscious food,--in my opinion of more worth
than the pineapples which are imported from the West Indies. Those
which lately even I tasted only to repent of it,--for I am
semicivilized,--which the farmer willingly left on the tree, I am now
glad to find have the property of hanging on like the leaves of the
young oaks. It is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling. Let the
frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then the rain or
a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to have borrowed a
flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in which they hang.
Or perchance you find, when you get home, that those which rattled in
your pocket have thawed, and the ice is turned to cider. But after the
third or fourth freezing and thawing they will not be found so good.

What are the imported half-ripe fruits of the torrid south, to this
fruit matured by the cold of the frigid north? These are those crabbed
apples with which I cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that
I might tempt him to eat. Now we both greedily fill our pockets with
them,--bending to drink the cup and save our lappets from the
overflowing juice,--and grow more social with their wine. Was there
one that hung so high and sheltered by the tangled branches that our
sticks could not dislodge it?

It is a fruit never carried to market, that I am aware of,--quite
distinct from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and
cider,--and it is not every winter that produces it in perfection.

The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will
probably become extinct in New England.
You may still wander through
old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part
went to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. I have heard of an
orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples
rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side,
and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider.
Since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted
fruit, no native apple trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted
pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out.
I fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not
know the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are
many pleasures which he will not know! Notwithstanding the prevalence
of the Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if so extensive orchards are
set out to-day in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast
straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank
apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost
nothing but the trouble of setting them out. Men could afford then to
stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. I see
nobody planting trees to-day in such out of the way places, along the
lonely roads and lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now
that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, they collect
them into a plat by their houses, and fence them in,--and the end of
it all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a
barrel.

This is "The word of the Lord that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.

"Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land!
Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers? . . .

"That which the palmerworm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that
which the locust hath left hath the cankerworm eaten; and that which
the cankerworm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten.