s fell.
She then took the hint and rubbed her shoulder with such vigor that the
farmer had to check her and keep an eye on her to save his fruit.

But the cow is the friend of the apple. How many trees she has planted
about the farm, in the edge of the woods, and in remote fields and
pastures. The wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of her
planting. She browses them down to be sure, but they are hers, and why
should she not?

What an individuality the apple-tree has, each variety being nearly
as marked by its form as by its fruit. What a vigorous grower, for
instance, is the Ribston pippin, an English apple. Wide branching like
the oak, and its large ridgy fruit, in late fall or early winter, is one
of my favorites. Or the thick and more pendent top of the belleflower,
with its equally rich, sprightly uncloying fruit.

Sweet apples are perhaps the most nutritious, and when baked are a feast
in themselves. With a tree of the Jersey sweet or of Tolman's sweeting
in bearing, no man's table need be devoid of luxuries and one of the
most wholesome of all deserts. Or the red astrachan, an August apple,
what a gap may be filled in the culinary department of a household at
this season, by a single tree of this fruit! And what a feast is its
shining crimson coat to the eye before its snow-white flesh has
reached the tongue. But the apple of apples for the household is the
spitzenberg. In this casket Pomona has put her highest flavors. It can
stand the ordeal of cooking and still remain a spitz. I recently saw
a barrel of these apples from the orchard of a fruit-grower in the
northern part of New York, who has devoted special attention to this
variety. They were perfect gems. Not large, that had not been the aim,
but small, fair, uniform, and red to the core. How intense, how spicy
and aromatic!

But all the excellences of the apple are not confined to the cultivated
fruit. Occasionally a seedling springs up about the farm that produces
fruit of rare beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted to the
apple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River, I have noticed that
most of the wild unbidden trees bear good, edible fruit. In cold and
ungenial districts, the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in
more favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet. I know wild
apples that ripen in August, and that do not need, if it could be had,
Thoreau's sauce of sharp November air to be eaten with. At the foot of