d out-of-doors in a stinging
atmosphere, who knows but you could whistle an octave higher and
clearer?

In the fields only are the sours and bitters of Nature appreciated; just
as the wood-chopper eats his meal in a sunny glade, in the middle of
a winter day, with content, basks in a sunny ray there and dreams of
summer in a degree of cold which, experienced in a chamber, would make a
student miserable. They who are at work abroad are not cold, but rather
it is they who sit shivering in houses. As with temperatures, so with
flavors; as with cold and heat, so with sour and sweet. This natural
raciness, the sours and bitters which the diseased palate refuses, are
the true condiments.

Let your condiments be in the condition of your senses. To appreciate
the flavor of these wild apples requires vigorous and healthy senses,
_papillae_ firm and erect on the tongue and palate, not easily flattened
and tamed.

From my experience with wild apples, I can understand that there may be
reason for a savage's preferring many kinds of food which the civilized
man rejects. The former has the palate of an out-door man. It takes a
savage or wild taste to appreciate a wild fruit.

What a healthy out-of-door appetite it takes to relish the apple of
life, the apple of the world, then!

"Nor is it every apple I desire,
Nor that which pleases every palate best;
'T is not the lasting Deuxan I require,
Nor yet the red-cheeked Greening I request,
Nor that which first beshrewed the name of
wife,
Nor that whose beauty caused the golden
strife:
No, no! bring me an apple from the tree of
life!"

So there is one thought for the field, another for the house. I would
have my thoughts, like wild apples, to be food for walkers, and will not
warrant them to be palatable, if tasted in the house.

THEIR BEAUTY.

Almost all wild apples are handsome. They cannot be too gnarly and
crabbed and rusty to look at. The gnarliest will have some redeeming
traits even to the eye. You will discover some evening redness dashed or
sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that the
summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some part of
its sphere. It will have some red stains, commemorating the mornings and
evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches, in memory of
the clouds and foggy, mildewy days that have passed over it; and a
spacious field of green reflecting the general face of N