Every wild-apple shrub excites our expectation thus, somewhat as every wild child.  It is, perhaps, a prince in disguise.  What a lesson to man!  So are human beings, referred to the highest standard, the celestial fruit which they suggest and aspire to bear, browsed on by fate; and only the most persistent and strongest genius defends itself and prevails, sends a tender scion upward at last, and drops its perfect fruit on the ungrateful earth.  Poets and philosophers and statesmen thus spring up in the country pastures, and outlast the hosts of unoriginal men.

Such is always the pursuit of knowledge.  The celestial fruits, the golden apples of the Hesperides, are ever guarded by a hundred-headed dragon which never sleeps, so that it is an Herculean labor to pluck them.

This is one, and the most remarkable way, in which the wild apple is propagated; but commonly it springs up at wide intervals in woods and swamps, and by the sides of roads, as the soil may suit it, and grows with comparative rapidity.  Those which grow in dense woods are very tall and slender.  I frequently pluck from these trees a perfectly mild and tamed fruit.  As Palladius says, “Et injussu consternitur ubere mali”:  And the ground is strewn with the fruit of an unbidden apple-tree.

It is an old notion, that, if these wild trees do not bear a valuable fruit of their own, they are the best stocks by which to transmit to posterity the most highly prized qualities of others.  However, I am not in search of stocks, but the wild fruit itself, whose fierce gust has suffered no “inteneration,” It is not my

  “highest plot
  To plant the Bergamot.”

THE FRUIT, AND ITS FLAVOR.

The time for wild apples is the last of October and the first of November.  They then get to be palatable, for they ripen late, and they are still perhaps as beautiful as ever.  I make a great account of these fruits, which the farmers do not think it worth the while to gather,—­wild flavors of the Muse, vivacious and inspiriting.  The farmer thinks that he has better in his barrels, but he is mistaken, unless he has a walker’s appetite and imagination, neither of which can he have.

Such as grow quite wild, and are left out till the first of November, I presume that the owner does not mean to gather.  They belong to children as wild as themselves,—­to certain active boys that I know,—­to the wild-eyed woman of the fields, to whom nothing comes amiss, who gleans after all the world,—­and, moreover, to us walkers.  We have met with them, and they are ours.  These rights, long enough insisted upon, have come to be an institution in some old countries, where they have learned how to live.  I hear that “the custom of grippling, which may be called apple-gleaning, is, or was formerly, practised in Herefordshire.  It consists in leaving a few apples, which are called the gripples, on every tree, after the general gathering, for the boys, who go with climbing-poles and bags to collect them.”