culture, naturally,
and not from any study of that author, whose books he had never seen.
The great Bacon was, in fact, a man of orchard and garden, and gathered
his ideas from the fields.

Just look at an apple on the tree, said Iden. Look at a Blenheim orange,
the inimitable mixture of colour, the gold and bronze, and ruddy tints,
not bright colours--undertones of bright colours--smoothed together and
polished, and made the more delightful by occasional roughness in the
rind. Or look at the brilliant King Pippin. Now he was getting older he
found, however, that the finest of them all was the russet. For eating,
at its proper season, it was good, but for cooking it was simply the
Imperial Caesar and Sultan of apples; whether for baking, or pies, or
sauce, there was none to equal it. Apple-sauce made of the real true
russet was a sauce for Jove's own table. It was necessary that it should
be the real russet. Indeed in apple trees you had to be as careful of
breeding and pedigree as the owners of racing stables were about their
horses.

Ripe apples could not be got all the year round in any variety; besides
which, in winter and cold weather the crudity of the stomach needed to
be assisted with a little warmth; therefore bake them.

People did not eat nearly enough fruit now-a-days; they had too much
butcher's meat, and not enough fruit--that is, home-grown fruit,
straight from orchard or garden, not the half-sour stuff sold in the
shops, picked before it was ready.

The Americans were much wiser (he knew a good deal about America--he had
been there in his early days, before thought superseded action)--the
Americans had kept up many of the fine old English customs of two or
three hundred years since, and among these was the eating of fruit. They
were accused of being so modern, so very, very modern, but, in fact, the
country Americans, with whom he had lived (and who had taught him how to
chop) maintained much of the genuine antique life of old England.

They had first-rate apples, yet it was curious that the same trees
produced an apple having a slightly different flavour to what it had in
this country. You could always distinguish an American apple by its
peculiar piquancy--a sub-acid piquancy, a wild strawberry piquancy, a
sort of woodland, forest, backwoods delicacy of its own. And so on, and
so on--"talk, talk, talk," as Mrs. Iden said.

After his baked apple he took another guilty look at the clock, it was
cl