Like some of the finest of wines and the warmest of friends it was of two flavours, and was not to be eaten for mere nourishment, but was to be tasted and enjoyed.  The first of the flavours came readily in a sweetness, richness, a slight acidity, that it might not cloy; but the deeper, more delicate flavour came later—­if one were not crudely impatient—­and was, indeed, the very soul of the fruit.  One does not quickly arrive at souls either in apples or in friends.  And I said to Horace with solemnity, for this was an occasion not to be lightly treated: 

“I have never in my life tasted a fine apple.”

“There is no finer apple,” said Horace with conviction.

With that we fell to discussing the kinds and qualities of all the apples grown this side China, and gave our more or less slighting opinions of Ben Davises and Greenings and Russets, and especially of trivial summer apples of all sorts, and came to the conclusion at last that it must have been just after God created this particular “tree yielding fruit” that he desisted from his day’s work and remarked that what he saw was good.  The record is silent upon the point, and Moses is not given to adjectives, but I have often wondered what He would have said if He had not only seen the product of His creation, but tasted it.

I forgot to say that when I would have slurred the excellence of the Baldwin in comparison with the Bellflower, Horace began at once to interpose objections, and defended the excellence and perfection of that variety.

...He has fifty barrels of Baldwins in his cellar.

While we talked with much enjoyment of the lore of apples and apple-growing, I finished the Bellflower to the very core, and said to Horace as I reluctantly tossed aside the stem and three seeds: 

“Surely this has been one of the rare moments of life.”

CHAPTER IX

I GO TO THE CITY.

“Surely man is a wonderfull, vaine, divers and wavering subject:  It is very hard to * ground and directly constant and uniforme judgement upon him.”

Though I live most of the time in the country, as I love best to do, sometimes I go to the city and find there much that is strange and amusing.  I like to watch the inward flow of the human tide in the morning, and the ebb at evening, and sometimes in the slack tide of noon I drift in one of the eddies where the restless life of the city pauses a moment to refresh itself.  One of the eddies I like best of all is near the corner of Madison Square, where the flood of Twenty-third Street swirls around the bulkhead of the Metropolitan tower to meet the transverse currents of Madison Avenue.  Here, of a bright morning when Down-at-Heels is generously warming himself on the park benches, and Old Defeat watches Young Hurry striding by, one has a royal choice of refreshment:  a “red-hot” enfolded in a bun from the dingy sausage wagon at the curb, or a plum for a penny from the Italian with the trundle cart, or news of the world in lurid gulps from the noon edition of the paper—­or else a curious idea or so flung out stridently over the heads of the crowd by a man on a soap box.