more mellow and perhaps more edible, they have generally, like the
leaves, lost their beauty, and are beginning to freeze. It is
finger-cold, and prudent farmers get in their barrelled apples, and
bring you the apples and cider which they have engaged; for it is
time to put them into the cellar. Perhaps a few on the ground show
their red cheeks above the early snow, and occasionally some even
preserve their color and soundness under the snow throughout the
winter. But generally at the beginning of the winter they freeze
hard, and soon, though undecayed, acquire the color of a baked
apple.

Before the end of December, generally, they experience their first
thawing. Those which a month ago were sour, crabbed, and quite
unpalatable to the civilized taste, such at least as were frozen
while sound, let a warmer sun come to thaw them, for they are
extremely sensitive to its rays, are found to be filled with a rich,
sweet cider, better than any bottled cider that I know of, and with
which I am better acquainted than with wine. All apples are good in
this state, and your jaws are the cider-press. Others, which have
more substance, are a sweet and luscious food,--in my opinion of
more worth than the pine-apples which are imported from the West
Indies. Those which lately even I tasted only to repent of it,--for
I am semi-civilized,--which the farmer willingly left on the tree, I
am now glad to find have the property of hanging on like the leaves
of the young oaks. It is a way to keep cider sweet without boiling.
Let the frost come to freeze them first, solid as stones, and then
the rain or a warm winter day to thaw them, and they will seem to
have borrowed a flavor from heaven through the medium of the air in
which they hang. Or perchance you find, when you get home, that
those which rattled in your pocket have thawed, and the ice is