e must admit, and carried
home will be sound and palatable next spring. What care I for Iduna's
apples so long as I can get these?

When I go by this shrub thus late and hardy, and see its dangling fruit,
I respect the tree, and I am grateful for Nature's bounty, even though
I cannot eat it. Here on this rugged and woody hill-side has grown an
apple-tree, not planted by man, no relic of a former orchard, but a
natural growth, like the pines and oaks. Most fruits which we prize and
use depend entirely on our care. Corn and grain, potatoes, peaches,
melons, etc., depend altogether on our planting; but the apple emulates
man's independence and enterprise. It is not simply carried, as I have
said, but, like him, to some extent, it has migrated to this New World,
and is even, here and there, making its way amid the aboriginal trees;
just as the ox and dog and horse sometimes run wild and maintain
themselves.

Even the sourest and crabbedest apple, growing in the most unfavorable
position, suggests such thoughts as these, it is so noble a fruit.

THE CRAB.

Nevertheless, _our_ wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who
belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods
from the cultivated stock. Wilder still, as I have said, there grows
elsewhere in this country a native and aboriginal Crab-Apple, _Malus
coronaria_, "whose nature has not yet been modified by cultivation." It
is found from Western New-York to Minnesota, and southward. Michaux
says that its ordinary height "is fifteen or eighteen feet, but it is
sometimes found twenty-five or thirty feet high," and that the large
ones "exactly resemble the common apple-tree." "The flowers are white
mingled with rose-color, and are collected in corymbs." They are
remarkable for their delicious odor. The fruit, according to him, is
about an inch and a half in diameter, and is intensely acid. Yet they
make fine sweetmeats, and also cider of them. He concludes, that, "if,
on being cultivated, it does not yield new and palatable varieties, it
will at least be celebrated for the beauty of its flowers, and for the
sweetness of its perfume."

I never saw the Crab-Apple till May, 1861. I had heard of it through
Michaux, but more modern botanists, so far as I know, have not treated
it as of any peculiar importance. Thus it was a half-fabulous tree
to me. I contemplated a pilgrimage to the "Glades," a portion of
Pennsylvania where it was said to gro