nch-basket is without them, and you can pass a winter's night by the
fireside with no thought of the fruit at your elbow, then be assured you
are no longer a boy, either in heart or years.

The genuine apple-eater comforts himself with an apple in their season
as others with a pipe or cigar. When he has nothing else to do, or is
bored, he eats an apple. While he is waiting for the train he eats an
apple, sometimes several of them. When he takes a walk, he arms himself
with apples. His traveling bag is full of apples. He offers an apple to
his companion, and takes one himself. They are his chief solace when
on the road. He sows their seed all along the route. He tosses the core
from the car-window and from the top of the stage-coach. He would, in
time, make the land one vast orchard. He dispenses with a knife. He
prefers that his teeth shall have the first taste. Then he knows the
best flavor is immediately beneath the skin, and that in a pared apple
this is lost. If you will stew the apple, he says, instead of baking
it, by all means leave the skin on. It improves the color and vastly
heightens the flavor of the dish.

The apple is a masculine fruit; hence women are poor apple-eaters. It
belongs to the open air, and requires an open-air taste and relish.

I instantly sympathized with that clergyman I read of, who on pulling
out his pocket-handkerchief in the midst of his discourse, pulled out
two bouncing apples with it that went rolling across the pulpit floor
and down the pulpit stairs. These apples were, no doubt, to be eaten
after the sermon on his way home, or to his next appointment. They would
take the taste of it out of his mouth. Then, would a minister be apt to
grow tiresome with two big apples in his coat-tail pockets? Would he not
naturally hasten along to "lastly," and the big apples? If they were the
dominie apples, and it was April or May, he certainly....

How the early settlers prized the apple! When their trees broke down or
were split asunder by the storms, the neighbors turned out, the divided
tree was put together again and fastened with iron bolts. In some of the
oldest orchards one may still occasionally see a large dilapidated tree
with the rusty iron bolt yet visible. Poor, sour fruit, too, but sweet
in those early pioneer days. My grandfather, who was one of these heroes
of the stump, used every fall to make a journey of forty miles for a
few apples, which he brought home in a bag on horsebac