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 and sheltered by the tangled branches that our sticks
could not dislodge it?
It is a fruit never carried to market, that I am aware of,—quite
distinct from the apple of the markets, as from dried apple and
cider,—and it is not every winter that produces it in perfection.
The era of the Wild Apple will soon be past. It is a fruit which will
probably become extinct in New England. You may still wander through
old orchards of native fruit of great extent, which for the most part
went to the cider-mill, now all gone to decay. I have heard of an
orchard in a distant town, on the side of a hill, where the apples
rolled down and lay four feet deep against a wall on the lower side,
and this the owner cut down for fear they should be made into cider.
Since the temperance reform and the general introduction of grafted
fruit, no native apple-trees, such as I see everywhere in deserted
pastures, and where the woods have grown up around them, are set out. I
fear that he who walks over these fields a century hence will not know
the pleasure of knocking off wild apples. Ah, poor man, there are many
pleasures which he will not know! Notwithstanding the prevalence of the
Baldwin and the Porter, I doubt if so extensive orchards are set out
to-day in my town as there were a century ago, when those vast
straggling cider-orchards were planted, when men both ate and drank
apples, when the pomace-heap was the only nursery, and trees cost
nothing but the trouble of setting them out. Men could afford then to
stick a tree by every wall-side and let it take its chance. I see
nobody planting trees to-day in such out-of-the-way places, along the
lonely roads and lanes, and at the bottom of dells in the wood. Now
that they have grafted trees, and pay a price for them, they collect
them into a plat by their houses, and fence them in,—and the end of it
all will be that we shall be compelled to look for our apples in a
barrel.
This is “The word of the Lord that came to Joel the son of Pethuel.
“Hear this, ye old men, and give ear, all ye inhabitants of the land!
Hath this been in your days, or even in the days of your fathers?…
“That which the palmer-worm hath left hath the locust eaten; and that
which the locust hath left hath the canker-worm eaten; and that which
the canker-worm hath left hath the caterpillar eaten.
“Awake, ye drunkards, and weep! and howl, all ye drinkers of wine,
because of the new wine! for it is cut off from your mouth.
“For a nation is come up upon my land, strong, and without number,
whose teeth are the teeth of a lion, and he hath the cheek-teeth of a
great lion.
“He hath laid my vine waste, and barked my fig-tree; he hath made it
clean bare, and cast it away; the branches thereof are made white….
“Be ye ashamed, O ye husbandmen! howl, O ye vine-dressers!…
“The vine is dried up, and the fig-tree languisheth; the
pomegranate-tree, the palm-tree also, and the apple-tree, even all the
trees of the field, are withered: because joy is withered away from the
sons of men.”