ature,--green
even as the fields; or a yellow ground, which implies a milder
flavor,--yellow as the harvest, or russet as the hills.

Apples, these I mean, unspeakably fair,--apples not of Discord, but
of Concord! Yet not so rare but that the homeliest may have a share.
Painted by the frosts, some a uniform clear bright yellow, or red, or
crimson, as if their spheres had regularly revolved, and enjoyed the
influence of the sun on all sides alike,--some with the faintest pink
blush imaginable,--some brindled with deep red streaks like a cow,
or with hundreds of fine blood-red rays running regularly from
the stem-dimple to the blossom-end, like meridional lines, on a
straw-colored ground,--some touched with a greenish rust, like a fine
lichen, here and there, with crimson blotches or eyes more or less
confluent and fiery when wet,--and others gnarly, and freckled or
peppered all over on the stem side with fine crimson spots on a white
ground, as if accidentally sprinkled from the brush of Him who paints
the autumn leaves. Others, again, are sometimes red inside, perfused
with a beautiful blush, fairy food, too beautiful to eat,--apple of the
Hesperides, apple of the evening sky! But like shells and pebbles on the
sea-shore, they must be seen as they sparkle amid the withering leaves
in some dell in the woods, in the autumnal air, or as they lie in the
wet grass, and not when they have wilted and faded in the house.

THE NAMING OF THEM.

It would be a pleasant pastime to find suitable names for the hundred
varieties which go to a single heap at the cider-mill. Would it not
tax a man's invention,--no one to be named after a man, and all in the
_lingua vernacula_? Who shall stand godfather at the christening of the
wild apples? It would exhaust the Latin and Greek languages, if they
were used, and make the _lingua vernacula_ flag. We should have to call
in the sunrise and the sunset, the rainbow and the autumn woods and the
wild flowers, and the woodpecker and the purple finch and the squirrel
and the jay and the butterfly, the November traveller and the truant
boy, to our aid.

In 1836 there were in the garden of the London Horticultural Society
more than fourteen hundred distinct sorts. But here are species which
they have not in their catalogue, not to mention the varieties which our
Crab might yield to cultivation.

Let us enumerate a few of these. I find myself compelled, after all, to
give the Latin names of