children. Yet all this is in line with much of our practice
whereby, in cookery and manipulation, we disguise our foods and show
our lack of appreciation of the products themselves.

For home use, winter apples may well be stored in boxes in a cool
moist cellar if such a place is available. For best results in long
keeping, the temperature should be maintained below 40 degrees F. In a
cellar containing a furnace, the fruits shrivel from too much
evaporation, as also in an attic or other dry room. If the fruit must
be stored in such places, it is well to keep the box or barrel tightly
closed, and the individual apples may be wrapped in thin paper.

The apples must be sorted now and then, to remove the decaying ones;
if the fruit was carefully sprayed, handled and graded in the first
place and not too ripe, the necessity of frequent sorting will be
considerably reduced. But in any case, the keeping of apples, except
under good cold-storage, is at best a process of continually saving
the most durable fruits. An "outside cellar," if properly ventilated,
usually is a good place in which to keep apples. With the use of
furnaces for heating and the cramped quarters of city apartments, the
keeping of apples for home supply is constantly more difficult.

There is no apple like the one that comes up fresh from the cellar on
a winter night, cool, crisp, solid yet ready. It is the fruit of the
home fireside. I often wonder whether one in a hundred of the people
know what a really good and timely apple is.

The yield of an apple-tree depends on many factors,--age, size,
thriftiness, care it has received, whether it has escaped frost and
other injuries; and some varieties are much more prolific than others.
Some apples are "shy bearers," and for this reason soon are lost to
propagation unless they have some superlative merit; Yellow
Bellflower is an example of a shy, or at least an irregular, bearer.
The great commercial varieties are of course good bearers, as Baldwin,
Ben Davis, Stayman, York Imperial, Oldenburg, Rome, McIntosh, Wealthy,
Yellow Transparent, Jonathan.

An apple-tree at full bearing is a wonderful sight at the harvest,
particularly in such varieties as McIntosh and Baldwin, in which the
fruit is highly colored and hangs well toward the outside of the
tree-top. While the first bearing year may yield only a half dozen
fruits, the crop increases rapidly with the added years,--one peck,
one bushel, five bushels, te