The English have no sweet apple, I am told, the saccharine element
apparently being less abundant in vegetable nature in that sour and
chilly climate than in our own. It is well known that the European
maple yields no sugar, while both our birch and hickory have sweet in
their veins. Perhaps this fact accounts for our excessive love of
sweets, which may be said to be a national trait.
The Russian apple has a lovely complexion, smooth and transparent, but
the Cossack is not yet all eliminated from it. The only one I have
seen--the Duchess of Oldenburg--is as beautiful as a Tartar princess,
with a distracting odor, but it is the least bit puckery to the taste.
The best thing I know about Chili is not its guano beds, but this fact
which I learn from Darwin's "Voyage," namely, that the apple thrives
well there. Darwin saw a town there so completely buried in a wood of
apple-trees, that its streets were merely paths in an orchard.
The tree indeed thrives so well, that large branches cut off in the
spring and planted two or three feet deep in the ground send out roots
and develop into fine full-bearing trees by the third year.
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