mell them; one may put his nose to the dish while
the fruit is yet too rare and choice for his fingers. Touch not and
taste not, but take a good smell and go mad! Last fall I potted some of
the Downer, and in the winter grew them in the house. In March the
berries were ripe, only four or five on a plant, just enough, all told,
to make one consider whether it were not worth while to kill off the
rest of the household, so that the berries need not be divided. But if
every tongue could not have a feast, every nose banqueted daily upon
them. They filled the house with perfume. The Downer is remarkable in
this respect. Grown in the open field, it surpasses in its odor any
strawberry of my acquaintance. And it is scarcely less agreeable to the
taste. It is a very beautiful berry to look upon, round, light pink,
with a delicate, fine-grained expression. Some berries shine, the
Downer glows as if there were a red bloom upon it. Its core is firm and
white, its skin thick and easily bruised, which makes it a poor market
berry, but, with its high flavor and productiveness, an admirable one
for home use. It seems to be as easily grown as the Wilson, while it is
much more palatable. The great trouble with the Wilson, as everybody
knows, is its rank acidity. When it first comes, it is difficult to eat
it without making faces. It is crabbed and acrimonious. Like some
persons, the Wilson will not ripen and sweeten till its old age. Its
largest and finest crop, if allowed to remain on the vines, will soften
and fail unregenerated, or with all its sins upon it. But wait till
toward the end of the season, after the plant gets over its hurry and
takes time to ripen its fruit. The berry will then face the sun for
days, and, if the weather is not too wet, instead of softening will
turn dark and grow rich. Out of its crabbedness and spitefulness come
the finest, choicest flavors. It is an astonishing berry. It lays hold
of the taste in a way that the aristocratic berries, like the Jocunda
or the Triumph, cannot approximate to. Its quality is as penetrating as
that of ants and wasps, but sweet. It is, indeed, a wild bee turned
into a berry, with the sting mollified and the honey disguised. A quart
of these rare-ripes I venture to say contains more of the peculiar
virtue and excellence of the strawberry kind than can be had in twice
the same quantity of any other cultivated variety. Take these berries
in a bowl of rich milk with some bread,--ah,