How pleasing to the touch!  I love to stroke its polished rondure with my hand, to carry it in my pocket on my tramp over the winter hills, or through the early spring woods.  You are company, you red-checked spitz, or you salmon-fleshed greening!  I toy with you; press your face to mine, toss you in the air, roll you on the ground, see you shine out where you lie amid the moss and dry leaves and sticks.  You are so alive!  You glow like a ruddy flower.  You look so animated I almost expect to see you move!  I postpone the eating of you, you are so beautiful!  How compact; how exquisitely tinted!  Stained by the sun and varnished against the rains.  An independent vegetable existence, alive and vascular as my own flesh; capable of being wounded, bleeding, wasting away, or almost of repairing damages!

How it resists the cold! holding out almost as long as the red cheeks of the boys do.  A frost that destroys the potatoes and other roots only makes the apple more crisp and vigorous; it peeps out from the chance November snows unscathed.  When I see the fruit-vender on the street corner stamping his feet and beating his hands to keep them warm, and his naked apples lying exposed to the blasts, I wonder if they do not ache, too, to clap their hands and enliven their circulation.  But they can stand it nearly as long as the vender can.

Noble common fruit, best friend of man and most loved by him, following him, like his dog or his cow, wherever he goes!  His homestead is not planted till you are planted, your roots intertwine with his; thriving best where he thrives best, loving the limestone and the frost, the plow and the pruning-knife:  you are indeed suggestive of hardy, cheerful industry, and a healthy life in the open air.  Temperate, chaste fruit! you mean neither luxury nor sloth, neither satiety nor indolence, neither enervating heats nor the frigid zones.  Uncloying fruit,—­fruit whose best sauce is the open air, whose finest flavors only he whose taste is sharpened by brisk work or walking knows; winter fruit, when the fire of life burns brightest; fruit always a little hyperborean, leaning toward the cold; bracing, sub-acid, active fruit!  I think you must come from the north, you are so frank and honest, so sturdy and appetizing.  You are stocky and homely like the northern races.  Your quality is Saxon.  Surely the fiery and impetuous south is not akin to you.  Not spices or olives, or the sumptuous liquid fruits, but the grass, the snow, the grains, the coolness, is akin to you.  I think if I could subsist on you, or the like of you, I should never have an intemperate or ignoble thought, never be feverish or despondent.  So far as I could absorb or transmute your quality, I should be cheerful, continent, equitable, sweet-blooded, long-lived, and should shed warmth and contentment around.