No More Learning

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. Let the most beautiful or
the swiftest have it. That should be the "going" price of apples.

Between the 5th and 20th of October I see the barrels lie under the
trees. And perhaps I talk with one who is selecting some choice
barrels to fulfill an order. He turns a specked one over many times
before he leaves it out. If I were to tell what is passing in my mind,
I should say that every one was specked which he had handled; for he
rubs off all the bloom, and those fugacious ethereal qualities leave
it. Cool evenings prompt the farmers to make haste, and at length I
see only the ladders here and there left leaning against the trees.

It would be well, if we accepted these gifts with more joy and
gratitude, and did not think it enough simply to put a fresh load of
compost about the tree. Some old English customs are suggestive at
least. I find them described chiefly in Brand's "Popular Antiquities. "
It appears that "on Christmas Eve the farmers and their men in
Devonshire take a large bowl of cider, with a toast in it, and
carrying it in state to the orchard, they salute the apple-trees with
much ceremony, in order to make them bear well the next season.