apple? What boy does not more than half believe they can see with that
single eye of theirs? Do they not look and nod to him from the bough?
The swaar has one look, the rambo another, the spy another. The youth
recognizes the seek-no-further buried beneath a dozen other varieties,
the moment he catches a glance of its eye, or the bonny-cheeked Newtown
pippin, or the gentle but sharp-nosed gilliflower. He goes to the great
bin in the cellar and sinks his shafts here and there in the garnered
wealth of the orchards, mining for his favorites, sometimes coming plump
upon them, sometimes catching a glimpse of them to the right or left,
or uncovering them as keystones in an arch made up of many varieties.
In the dark he can usually tell them by the sense of touch. There is
not only the size and shape, but there is the texture and polish. Some
apples are coarse grained and some are fine; some are thin-skinned and
some are thick. One variety is quick and vigorous beneath the touch;
another gentle and yielding. The pinnock has a thick skin with a spongy
lining, a bruise in it becomes like a piece of cork. The tallow apple
has an unctuous feel, as its name suggests. It sheds water like a duck.
What apple is that with a fat curved stem that blends so prettily
with its own flesh,--the wine-apple? Some varieties impress me as
masculine,--weather-stained, freckled, lasting and rugged; others
are indeed lady apples, fair, delicate, shining, mild-flavored,
white-meated, like the egg-drop and the lady-finger. The practiced hand
knows each kind by the touch. Do you remember the apple hole in the
garden or back of the house, Ben Bolt? In the fall after the bins in the
cellar had been well stocked, we excavated a circular pit in the warm,
mellow earth, and covering the bottom with clean rye straw, emptied in
basketful after basketful of hardy choice varieties, till there was a
tent-shaped mound several feet high of shining variegated fruit. Then
wrapping it about with a thick layer of long rye straw, and tucking it
up snug and warm, the mound was covered, with a thin coating of earth, a
flat stone on the top holding down the straw. As winter set in, another
coating of earth was put upon it, with perhaps an overcoat of coarse dry
stable manure, and the precious pile was left in silence and darkness
till spring. No marmot hibernating under-ground in his nest of leaves
and dry grass, more cosy and warm. No frost, no wet, but fragrant
privacy and quiet. Then how the earth tempers and flavors the apples! It
draws out all the acrid unripe qualities, and infuses into them a subtle
refreshing taste of the soil. Some varieties perish; but the ranker,
hardier kinds, like the northern spy, the greening, or the black apple,
or the russet, or the pinnock, how they ripen and grow in grace, how the
green becomes gold, and the bitter becomes sweet!
As the supply in the bins and barrels gets low and spring approaches,
the buried treasures in the garden are remembered. With spade and axe
we go out and penetrate through the snow and frozen earth till the inner
dressing of straw is laid bare. It is not quite as clear and bright as
when we placed it there last fall, but the fruit beneath, which the
hand soon exposes, is just as bright and far more luscious. Then, as day
after day you resort to the hole, and, removing the straw and earth from
the opening, thrust your arm into the fragrant pit, you have a better
chance than ever before to become acquainted with your favorites by the
sense of touch. How you feel for them, reaching to the right and left!
Now you have got a Tolman sweet; you imagine you can feel that single
meridian line that divides it into two hemispheres. Now a greening fills
your hand, you feel its fine quality beneath its rough coat. Now you
have hooked a swaar, you recognize its full face; now a Vandevere or a
King rolls down from the apex above, and you bag it at once. When you
were a school-boy you stowed these away in your pockets and ate them
along the road and at recess, and again at noon time; and they, in
a measure, corrected the effects of the cake and pie with which your
indulgent mother filled your lunch-basket.
The boy is indeed the true apple-eater, and is not to be questioned how
he came by the fruit with which his pockets are filled. It belongs to
him...His own juicy flesh craves the juicy flesh of the apple. Sap draws
sap. His fruit-eating has little reference to the state of his appetite.
Whether he be full of meat or empty of meat he wants the apple just
the same. Before meal or after meal it never comes amiss. The farm-boy
munches apples all day long. He has nests of them in the hay-mow,
mellowing, to which he makes frequent visits. Sometimes old Brindle,
having access through the open door, smells them out and makes short
work of them.
In some countries the custom remains of placing a rosy apple in the hand
of the dead that they may find it when they enter paradise. In northern
mythology the giants eat apples to keep off old age.
The apple is indeed the fruit of youth. As we grow old we crave apples
less. It is an ominous sign. When you are ashamed to be seen eating them
on the street; when you can carry them in your pocket and your hand not
constantly find its way to them; when your neighbor has apples and you
have none, and you make no nocturnal visits to his orchard; when your
lunch-basket is without them, and you can pass a winter's night by the
fireside with no thought of the fruit at your elbow, then be assured you
are no longer a boy, either in heart or years.
The genuine apple-eater comforts himself with an apple in their season
as others with a pipe or cigar. When he has nothing else to do, or is
bored, he eats an apple. While he is waiting for the train he eats an
apple, sometimes several of them. When he takes a walk, he arms himself
with apples. His traveling bag is full of apples. He offers an apple to
his companion, and takes one himself. They are his chief solace when
on the road. He sows their seed all along the route. He tosses the core
from the car-window and from the top of the stage-coach. He would, in
time, make the land one vast orchard. He dispenses with a knife. He
prefers that his teeth shall have the first taste. Then he knows the
best flavor is immediately beneath the skin, and that in a pared apple
this is lost. If you will stew the apple, he says, instead of baking
it, by all means leave the skin on. It improves the color and vastly
heightens the flavor of the dish.
The apple is a masculine fruit; hence women are poor apple-eaters. It
belongs to the open air, and requires an open-air taste and relish.
I instantly sympathized with that clergyman I read of, who on pulling
out his pocket-handkerchief in the midst of his discourse, pulled out
two bouncing apples with it that went rolling across the pulpit floor
and down the pulpit stairs. These apples were, no doubt, to be eaten
after the sermon on his way home, or to his next appointment. They would
take the taste of it out of his mouth. Then, would a minister be apt to
grow tiresome with two big apples in his coat-tail pockets? Would he not
naturally hasten along to "lastly," and the big apples? If they were the
dominie apples, and it was April or May, he certainly....
How the early settlers prized the apple! When their trees broke down or
were split asunder by the storms, the neighbors turned out, the divided
tree was put together again and fastened with iron bolts. In some of the
oldest orchards one may still occasionally see a large dilapidated tree
with the rusty iron bolt yet visible. Poor, sour fruit, too, but sweet
in those early pioneer days. My grandfather, who was one of these heroes
of the stump, used every fall to make a journey of forty miles for a
few apples, which he brought home in a bag on horseback. He frequently
started from home by two or three o'clock in the morning, and at one
time both he and his horse were much frightened by the screaming of
panthers in a narrow pass in the mountains through which the road led.
Emerson, I believe, has spoken of the apple as the social fruit of New
England. Indeed, what a promoter or abettor of social intercourse among
our rural population the apple has been, the company growing more merry
and unrestrained as soon as the basket of apples was passed round!
When the cider followed, the introduction and good understanding were
complete. Then those rural gatherings that enlivened the autumn in the
country, known as "apple cuts," now, alas! nearly obsolete, where so
many things were cut and dried besides apples! The larger and more
loaded the orchard, the more frequently the invitations went round and
the higher the social and convivial spirit ran. Ours is eminently a
country of the orchard. Horace Greeley said he had seen no land in
which the orchard formed such a prominent feature in the rural and
agricultural districts. Nearly every farmhouse in the Eastern and
Northern States has its setting or its background of apple-trees, which
generally date back to the first settlement of the farm. Indeed, the
orchard, more than almost any other thing, tends to soften and humanize
the country, and to give the place of which it is an adjunct, a settled,
domestic look. The apple-tree takes the rawness and wildness off any
scene. On the top of a mountain, or in remote pastures, it sheds the
sentiment of home. It never loses its domestic air, or lapses into a
wild state. And in planting a homestead, or in choosing a building
site for the new house, what a help it is to have a few old, maternal
apple-trees near by; regular old grandmothers, who have seen trouble,
who have been sad and glad through so many winters and summers, who have
blossomed till the air about them is sweeter than elsewhere, and borne
fruit till the grass beneath them has become thick and soft from human
contact, and who have nourished robins and finches in their branches
till they have a tender, brooding look. The ground, the turf, the
atmosphere of an old orchard, seem several stages nearer to man than
that of the adjoining field, as if the trees had given back to the soil
more than they had taken from it; as if they had tempered the elements
and attracted all the genial and beneficent influences in the landscape
around.
An apple orchard is sure to bear you several crops beside the apple.
There is the crop of sweet and tender reminiscences dating from
childhood and spanning the seasons from May to October, and making the
orchard a sort of outlying part of the household. You have played
there as a child, mused there as a youth or lover, strolled there as a
thoughtful, sad-eyed man. Your father, perhaps, planted the trees, or
reared them from the seed, and you yourself have pruned and grafted
them, and worked among them, till every separate tree has a peculiar
history and meaning in your mind. Then there is the never-failing crop
of birds--robins, goldfinches, king-birds, cedar-birds, hair-birds,
orioles, starlings--all nesting and breeding in its branches, and fitly
described by Wilson Flagg as "Birds of the Garden and Orchard." Whether
the pippin and sweetbough bear or not, the "punctual birds" can always
be depended on. Indeed, there are few better places to study ornithology
than in the orchard. Besides its regular occupants, many of the birds
of the deeper forest find occasion to visit it during the season. The
cuckoo comes for the tent-caterpillar, the jay for frozen apples,
the ruffed grouse for buds, the crow foraging for birds' eggs, the
woodpecker and chickadees for their food, and the high-hole for ants.
The red-bird comes too, if only to see what a friendly covert its
branches form; and the wood-thrush now and then comes out of the grove
near by, and nests alongside of its cousin, the robin. The smaller hawks
know that this is a most likely spot for their prey; and in spring the
shy northern warblers may be studied as they pause to feed on the fine
insects amid its branches. The mice love to dwell here also, and hither
comes from the near woods the squirrel and the rabbit. The latter will
put his head through the boy's slipper-noose any time for taste of the
sweet apple, and the red squirrel and chipmunk esteem its seeds a great
rarity.
All the domestic animals love the apple, but none so much so as the cow.
The taste of it wakes her up as few other things do, and bars and fences
must be well looked after. No need to assort them or pick out the ripe
ones for her. An apple is an apple, and there is no best about it. I
heard of a quick-witted old cow that learned to shake them down from
the tree. While rubbing herself she had observed that an apple sometimes
fell. This stimulated her to rub a little harder, when more apples fell.
She then took the hint and rubbed her shoulder with such vigor that the
farmer had to check her and keep an eye on her to save his fruit.
But the cow is the friend of the apple. How many trees she has planted
about the farm, in the edge of the woods, and in remote fields and
pastures. The wild apples, celebrated by Thoreau, are mostly of her
planting. She browses them down to be sure, but they are hers, and why
should she not?
What an individuality the apple-tree has, each variety being nearly
as marked by its form as by its fruit. What a vigorous grower, for
instance, is the Ribston pippin, an English apple. Wide branching like
the oak, and its large ridgy fruit, in late fall or early winter, is one
of my favorites. Or the thick and more pendent top of the belleflower,
with its equally rich, sprightly uncloying fruit.
Sweet apples are perhaps the most nutritious, and when baked are a feast
in themselves. With a tree of the Jersey sweet or of Tolman's sweeting
in bearing, no man's table need be devoid of luxuries and one of the
most wholesome of all deserts. Or the red astrachan, an August apple,
what a gap may be filled in the culinary department of a household at
this season, by a single tree of this fruit! And what a feast is its
shining crimson coat to the eye before its snow-white flesh has
reached the tongue. But the apple of apples for the household is the
spitzenberg. In this casket Pomona has put her highest flavors. It can
stand the ordeal of cooking and still remain a spitz. I recently saw
a barrel of these apples from the orchard of a fruit-grower in the
northern part of New York, who has devoted special attention to this
variety. They were perfect gems. Not large, that had not been the aim,
but small, fair, uniform, and red to the core. How intense, how spicy
and aromatic!
But all the excellences of the apple are not confined to the cultivated
fruit. Occasionally a seedling springs up about the farm that produces
fruit of rare beauty and worth. In sections peculiarly adapted to the
apple, like a certain belt along the Hudson River, I have noticed that
most of the wild unbidden trees bear good, edible fruit. In cold and
ungenial districts, the seedlings are mostly sour and crabbed, but in
more favorable soils they are oftener mild and sweet. I know wild
apples that ripen in August, and that do not need, if it could be had,
Thoreau's sauce of sharp November air to be eaten with. At the foot of
a hill near me and striking its roots deep in the shale, is a giant
specimen of native tree that bears an apple that has about the clearest,
waxiest, most transparent complexion I ever saw. It is good size, and
the color of a tea-rose. Its quality is best appreciated in the kitchen.
I know another seedling of excellent quality and so remarkable for its
firmness and density, that it is known on the farm where it grows as the
"heavy apple."
I have alluded to Thoreau, to whom all lovers of the apple and its tree
are under obligation. His chapter on Wild Apples is a most delicious
piece of writing. It has a "tang and smack" like the fruit it
celebrates, and is dashed and streaked with color in the same manner.
It has the hue and perfume of the crab, and the richness and raciness of
the pippin. But Thoreau loved other apples than the wild sorts and was
obliged to confess that his favorites could not be eaten in-doors. Late
in November he found a blue-pearmain tree growing within the edge of a
swamp, almost as good as wild. "You would not suppose," he says, "that
there was any fruit left there on the first survey, but you must look
according to system. Those which lie exposed are quite brown and rotten
now, or perchance a few still show one blooming cheek here and there
amid the wet leaves. Nevertheless, with experienced eyes I explore amid
the bare alders, and the huckleberry bushes, and the withered sedge, and
in the crevices of the rocks, which are full of leaves, and pry under
the fallen and decayed ferns which, with apple and alder leaves, thickly
strew the ground. For I know that they lie concealed, fallen into
hollows long since, and covered up by the leaves of the tree itself--a
proper kind of packing. From these lurking places, everywhere within the
circumference of the tree, I draw forth the fruit all wet and glossy,
maybe nibbled by rabbits and hollowed out by crickets, and perhaps
a leaf or two cemented to it (as Curzon an old manuscript from a
monastery's mouldy cellar), but still with a rich bloom on it, and at
least as ripe and well kept, if no better than those in barrels, more
crisp and lively than they. If these resources fail to yield anything,
I have learned to look between the leaves of the suckers which spring
thickly from some horizontal limb, for now and then one lodges there, or
in the very midst of an alder-clump, where they are covered by leaves,
safe from cows which may have smelled them out. If I am sharp-set, for I
do not refuse the blue-pearmain, I fill my pockets on each side; and as
I retrace my steps, in the frosty eve being perhaps four or five miles
from home, I eat one first from this side, and then from that, to keep
my balance."
A TASTE OF MAINE BIRCH.
The traveler and camper-out in Maine, unless he penetrates its more
northern portions, has less reason to remember it as a pine-tree State
than a birch-tree State. The white-pine forests have melted away like
snow in the spring and gone down stream, leaving only patches here and
there in the more remote and inaccessible parts. The portion of the
State I saw--the valley of the Kennebec and the woods about Moxie
Lake--had been shorn of its pine timber more than forty years before,
and is now covered with a thick growth of spruce and cedar and various
deciduous trees. But the birch abounds. Indeed, when the pine goes out
the birch comes in; the race of men succeeds the race of giants.
This tree has great stay-at-home virtues. Let the sombre, aspiring,
mysterious pine go; the birch has humble every-day uses. In Maine, the
paper or canoe birch is turned to more account than any other tree. I
read in Gibbon that the natives of ancient Assyria used to celebrate
in verse or prose the three hundred and sixty uses to which the various
parts and products of the palm-tree were applied. The Maine birch is
turned to so many accounts that it may well be called the palm of this
region. Uncle Nathan, our guide, said it was made especially for the
camper-out; yes, and for the wood-man and frontiersman generally. It is
a magazine, a furnishing store set up in the wilderness, whose goods are
free to every comer. The whole equipment of the camp lies folded in it,
and comes forth at the beck of the woodman's axe; tent, waterproof
roof, boat, camp utensils, buckets, cups, plates, spoons, napkins,
table cloths, paper for letters or your journal, torches, candles,
kindling-wood, and fuel. The canoe-birch yields you its vestments with
the utmost liberality. Ask for its coat, and it gives you its waistcoat
also. Its bark seems wrapped about it layer upon layer, and comes off
with great ease. We saw many rude structures and cabins shingled and
sided with it, and haystacks capped with it. Near a maple-sugar camp
there was a large pile of birch-bark sap-buckets,--each bucket made of
a piece of bark about a yard square, folded up as the tinman folds up
a sheet of tin to make a square vessel, the corners bent around against
the sides and held by a wooden pin. When, one day, we were overtaken
by a shower in traveling through the woods, our guide quickly stripped
large sheets of the bark from a near tree, and we had each a perfect
umbrella as by magic. When the rain was over, and we moved on, I wrapped
mine about me like a large leather apron, and it shielded my clothes
from the wet bushes. When we came to a spring, Uncle Nathan would have
a birch-bark cup ready before any of us could get a tin one out of his
knapsack, and I think water never tasted so sweet as from one of these
bark cups. It is exactly the thing. It just fits the mouth and it seems
to give new virtues to the water. It makes me thirsty now when I think
of it. In our camp at Moxie we made a large birch-bark box to keep the
butter in; and the butter in this box, covered with some leafy boughs,
I think improved in flavor day by day. Maine butter needs something to
mollify and sweeten it a little, and I think birch bark will do it. In
camp Uncle Nathan often drank his tea and coffee from a bark cup; the
china closet in the birch-tree was always handy, and our vulgar tin
ware was generally a good deal mixed, and the kitchen-maid not at all
particular about dish-washing. We all tried the oatmeal with the maple
syrup in one of these dishes, and the stewed mountain cranberries,
using a birch-bark spoon, and never found service better. Uncle Nathan
declared he could boil potatoes in a bark kettle, and I did not doubt
him. Instead of sending our soiled napkins and table-spreads to the
wash, we rolled them up into candles and torches, and drew daily upon
our stores in the forest for new ones.
But the great triumph of the birch is of course the bark canoe. When
Uncle Nathan took us out under his little wood-shed, and showed us, or
rather modestly permitted us to see, his nearly finished canoe, it was
like a first glimpse of some new and unknown genius of the woods or
streams. It sat there on the chips and shavings and fragments of bark
like some shy delicate creature just emerged from its hiding-place, or
like some wild flower just opened. It was the first boat of the kind
I had ever seen, and it filled my eye completely. What woodcraft it
indicated, and what a wild free life, sylvan life, it promised! It had
such a fresh, aboriginal look as I had never before seen in any kind of
handiwork. Its clear yellow-red color would have become the cheek of an
Indian maiden. Then its supple curves and swells, its sinewy stays
and thwarts, its bow-like contour, its tomahawk stem and stern rising
quickly and sharply from its frame, were all vividly suggestive of the
race from which it came. An old Indian had taught Uncle Nathan the art,
and the soul of the ideal red man looked out of the boat before us.
Uncle Nathan had spent two days ranging the mountains looking for a
suitable tree, and had worked nearly a week on the craft. It was
twelve feet long, and would seat and carry five men nicely. Three trees
contribute to the making of a canoe besides the birch, namely, the white
cedar for ribs and lining, the spruce for roots and fibres to sew its
joints and bind its frame, and the pine for pitch or rosin to stop its
seams and cracks. It is hand-made and home-made, or rather wood-made,
in a sense that no other craft is, except a dug-out, and it suggests a
taste and a refinement that few products of civilization realize. The
design of a savage, it yet looks like the thought of a poet, and its
grace and fitness haunt the imagination. I suppose its production was
the inevitable result of the Indian's wants and surroundings, but that
does not detract from its beauty. It is, indeed, one of the fairest
flowers the thorny plant of necessity ever bore. Our canoe, as I have
intimated, was not yet finished when we first saw it, nor yet when we
took it up, with its architect, upon our metaphorical backs and bore it
to the woods. It lacked part of its cedar lining and the rosin upon its
joints, and these were added after we reached our destination.