pe hand-picked fruit
of the first quality, in competition with the best commercial supply.

Winter apples are picked in the Northern States in October, sometimes
late in September. They are then full grown, but are hard and
inedible. The red varieties are full colored; the green ones show more
or less yellow. Light early frost does not injure them on the tree.
Usually they are placed at first in piles or windrows; and from these
piles they are barreled or boxed for market. If the choicest grades
are to be made, they should be taken to a packing-house.

The apple is an easy fruit to pick. The stem parts readily from the
spur or twig. Yet if the harvester is choice of his trees he will work
deftly rather than roughly, not to injure the bearing wood. The fruits
are placed in baskets as they are plucked, sometimes in a bag slung
over the shoulders but this is not the best way when the apples are
ripe. In the packing-house, the fruits are sorted into uniform grades
if they are for market.

The better the trees are tilled, pruned and sprayed, the more uniform
will be the crop, and particularly if the fruit is thinned on the
tree; yet the second-class and even cull apples will be many under
ordinary conditions. The purchaser, noting the price of extra-grade
apples, may not realize that he buys only the remainder in a long
process of grading, extending really over the season or even
throughout the life of the orchard. In all this time, the grower has
borne the risks of frosts and hail, insect and fungus invasions, lack
of help, and disastrously low prices. A finished product of high
quality is always expensive.

The usual apples on the open market are not the kind I have here tried
to describe. They are the product of indifferent orchards or of
careless handling. They are purchased for cooking; and the eating of
apples out of hand because they are attractive and really good is an
unknown experience with great numbers of our people. The polished
shiny apples of the fruit-stands are a delusion. The practice of
burnishing the fruits produces a most inartistic result, destroying
the natural bloom and violating the appearance of a natural apple. It
is one thing to clean a fruit if it is soiled (which is seldom the
case with boxed or barreled apples); it is quite another thing to rub
and furbish an apple as if it were a billiard ball or glass marble and
not a living object that grew on a tree,--it sets false standards
before the