t treacle is obtained called honey. The children and the pigs eat
little or no other food. He does not add that the people are healthy
and temperate, but I have no doubt they are. We knew the apple had many
virtues, but these Chilians have really opened a deep beneath a deep.
We had found out the cider and the spirits, but who guessed the wine and
the honey, unless it were the bees? There is a variety in our orchards
called the winesap, a doubly liquid name that suggests what might be
done with this fruit.

The apple is the commonest and yet the most varied and beautiful of
fruits. A dish of them is as becoming to the centre-table in winter as
was the vase of flowers in the summer,--a bouquet of spitzenbergs and
greenings and northern spies. A rose when it blooms, the apple is a rose
when it ripens. It pleases every sense to which it can be addressed, the
touch, the smell, the sight, the taste; and when it falls in the still
October days it pleases the ear. It is a call to a banquet, it is a
signal that the feast is ready. The bough would fain hold it, but it can
now assert its independence; it can now live a life of its own.

Daily the stem relaxes its hold, till finally it lets go completely, and
down comes the painted sphere with a mellow thump to the earth, towards
which it has been nodding so long. It bounds away to seek its bed,
to hide under a leaf, or in a tuft of grass. It will now take time to
meditate and ripen! What delicious thoughts it has there nestled with
its fellows under the fence, turning acid into sugar, and sugar into
wine!

How pleasing to the touch! I love to stroke its polished rondure with
my hand, to carry it in my pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, or
through the early spring woods. You are company, you red-cheeked spitz,
or you salmon-fleshed greening! I toy with you; press your face to mine,
toss you in the air, roll you on the ground, see you shine out where you
lie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks. You are so alive! You glow
like a ruddy flower. You look so animated I almost expect to see you
move. I postpone the eating of you, you are so beautiful! How compact;
how exquisitely tinted! Stained by the sun and varnished against the
rains. An independent vegetable existence, alive and vascular as my own
flesh; capable of being wounded, bleeding, wasting away, and almost of
repairing damages!

How it resists the cold! holding out almost as long as the red cheeks
of the boys