white, its skin thick and easily bruised, which makes it a poor market
berry, but, with its high flavor and productiveness, an admirable one
for home use. It seems to be as easily grown as the Wilson, while it is
much more palatable. The great trouble with the Wilson, as everybody
knows, is its rank acidity. When it first comes, it is difficult to eat
it without making faces. It is crabbed and acrimonious. Like some
persons, the Wilson will not ripen and sweeten till its old age. Its
largest and finest crop, if allowed to remain on the vines, will soften
and fail unregenerated, or with all its sins upon it. But wait till
toward the end of the season, after the plant gets over its hurry and
takes time to ripen its fruit. The berry will then face the sun for
days, and, if the weather is not too wet, instead of softening will
turn dark and grow rich. Out of its crabbedness and spitefulness come
the finest, choicest flavors. It is an astonishing berry. It lays hold
of the taste in a way that the aristocratic berries, like the Jocunda
or the Triumph, cannot approximate to. Its quality is as penetrating as
that of ants and wasps, but sweet. It is, indeed, a wild bee turned
into a berry, with the sting mollified and the honey disguised. A quart
of these rare-ripes I venture to say contains more of the peculiar
virtue and excellence of the strawberry kind than can be had in twice
the same quantity of any other cultivated variety. Take these berries
in a bowl of rich milk with some bread,--ah, what a dish!--too good to
set before a king! I suspect this was the food of Adam in Paradise,
only Adam did not have the Wilson strawberry; he had the wild
strawberry that Eve plucked in their hill-meadow and "hulled" with her
own hands, and that, take it all in all, even surpasses the late-
ripened Wilson.

Adam is still extant in the taste and the appetite of most country
boys; lives there a country boy who does not like wild strawberries and