PPLE.

Toward the end of November, though some of the sound ones are yet more
mellow and perhaps more edible, they have generally, like the leaves,
lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. It is finger-cold, and
prudent farmers get in their barrelled apples, and bring you the apples
and cider which they have engaged; for it is time to put them into the
cellar. Perhaps a few on the ground show their red cheeks above the
early snow, and occasionally some even preserve their color and
soundness under the snow throughout the winter. But generally at the
beginning of the winter they freeze hard, and soon, though undecayed,
acquire the color of a baked apple.

Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first
thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite
unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen while
sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, for they are extremely
sensitive to its rays, are found to be filled with a rich sweet cider,
better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with which I am better
acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in this state, and your
jaws are the cider-press. Others, which have more substance, are a sweet
and luscious food,--in my opinion of more worth than the pine-apples
which are imported from the West Indies. Those which lately even I
tasted only to repent of it,--for I am semi-civilized,--which the farmer
willingly left on the tree, I am now glad to find have the property of
hanging on like the leaves of the young oaks. It is a way to keep cider
sweet without boiling. Let the frost come to freeze them first, solid as
stones, and then the rain or a warm winter day to thaw them, and they
will seem to have borrowed a flavor from heaven through the medium of
the air in which they hang. Or perchance you find, when you get home,
that those which rattled in your pocket have thawed, and the ice is
turned to cider. But after the third or fourth freezing and thawing they
will not be found so good.

What are the imported half-ripe fruits of the torrid South, to this
fruit matured by the cold of the frigid North? These are those crabbed
apples with which I cheated my companion, and kept a smooth face that
I might tempt him to eat. Now we both greedily fill our pockets
with them,--bending to drink the cup and save our lappets from the
overflowing juice,--and grow more social with their wine. Was there one
that hung so high