rt. "Those dear dirty
dates," she calls them, but I cannot share her liking for them. Although
the cart is a beguiling market, dates so bought are too dusty to be eaten.
They rank with the apple-john. The apple-john is that mysterious leathery
fruit, sold more often from a stand than from a cart, which leans at the
rear of the shelf against the peppermint jars. For myself, although I do
not eat apple-johns, I like to look at them. They are so shrivelled and so
flat, as though a banana had caught a consumption. Or rather, in the older
world was there not a custom at a death of sending fruits to support the
lonesome journey? If so, the apple-john came untasted to the end. Indeed,
there is a look of old Egypt about the fruit. Whether my fondness for
gazing at apple-johns springs from a distant occasion when as a child I
once bought and ate one, or whether it arises from the fact that Falstaff
called Prince Hal a dried apple-john, is an unsolved question, but I like
to linger before a particularly shrivelled one and wonder what its youth
was like. Perhaps like many of its betters, it remained unheralded and
unknown all through its fresher years and not until the coming of its
wrinkled age was it at last put up to the common view. The apple-john sets
up kinship with an author.

The day of all fools is wisely put in April. The jest of the day resides in
the success with which credulity is imposed upon, and April is the month of
easiest credulity. Let bragging travellers come in April and hold us with
tales of the Anthropopagi! If their heads are said to grow beneath their
shoulders, still we will turn a credent ear. Indeed, it is all but sure
that Baron Munchausen came back from his travels in the Spring. When
else could he have got an ear? What man can look upon the wonders of the
returning year--the first blue skies, the soft rains, the tender sproutings
of green stalks without feeling that there is nothing beyond belief? If
such miracles can happen before his eyes, shall not the extreme range even
of travel or metaphysics be allowed? What man who has smelled the first
fragrance of the earth, has heard the birds on their northern flight and
has seen an April brook upon its course, will withhold his credence even
though the jest be plain?

I beg, therefore, that when you walk upon the street on the next day of
April fool, that you yield to the occasion. If an urchin points his finger
at your hat, humor him by removing it! Lo