The wild apples are now getting palatable. I find a few left on distant trees, which the farmer thinks it not worth his while to gather. He 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. These apples cannot be too knurly and rusty and crabbed (to look at). The knurliest will have some redeeming traits, even to the eyes. You will discover some evening redness dashed or sprinkled on some protuberance or in some cavity. It is rare that the summer lets an apple go without streaking or spotting it on some part of its sphere, though perchance one side may only seem to betray that it has once fallen in a brick-yard, and the other have been bespattered from a roily ink-bottle. Some red stains it will have, commemorating the mornings and evenings it has witnessed; some dark and rusty blotches, in memory of the clouds and foggy mildewy days that have passed over it; and a spacious field of green, reflecting the general face of nature, - green even as the fields; or yellowish ground, if it has a sunny flavor, - yellow as the harvests, or russet as the hills. The saunterer’s apple not even the saunterer can eat in the house. The noblest of fruits is the apple. Let the most beautiful or swiftest have it.
The robins now fly in flocks.
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