the year.

What a challenge it is to the taste! how it bites back again! and is
there any other sound like the snap and crackle with which it salutes
the ear on being plucked from the stems? It is a threat to one sense
that the other is soon to verify. It snaps to the ear as it smacks to
the tongue. All other berries are tame beside it.

The plant is almost an evergreen; it loves the coverlid of the snow,
and will keep fresh through the severest winters with a slight
protection. The frost leaves its virtues in it. The berry is a kind of
vegetable snow. How cool, how tonic, how melting, and how perishable!
It is almost as easy to keep frost. Heat kills it, and sugar quickly
breaks up its cells.

Is there anything like the odor of strawberries? The next best thing to
tasting them is to smell them; one may put his nose to the dish while
the fruit is yet too rare and choice for his fingers. Touch not and
taste not, but take a good smell and go mad! Last fall I potted some of
the Downer, and in the winter grew them in the house. In March the
berries were ripe, only four or five on a plant, just enough, all told,
to make one consider whether it were not worth while to kill off the
rest of the household, so that the berries need not be divided. But if
every tongue could not have a feast, every nose banqueted daily upon
them. They filled the house with perfume. The Downer is remarkable in
this respect. Grown in the open field, it surpasses in its odor any
strawberry of my acquaintance. And it is scarcely less agreeable to the
taste. It is a very beautiful berry to look upon, round, light pink,
with a delicate, fine-grained expression. Some berries shine, the
Downer glows as if there were a red bloom upon it. Its core is firm and