The people
know the value of the apple too. They make cider and wine of it and
then from the refuse a white and finely flavored spirit; then by
another process a sweet treacle is obtained called honey. The children
and the pigs eat little or no other food. He does not add that the
people are healthy and temperate, but I have no doubt they are.
We knew the apple had many virtues, but these Chilians have really
opened a deep beneath a deep. We had found out the cider and the
spirits, but who guessed the wine and the honey, unless it were the
bees? There is a variety in our orchards called the winesap, a doubly
liquid name that suggests what might be done with this fruit.
The apple is the commonest and yet the most varied and beautiful of
fruits. A dish of them is as becoming to the centre-table in winter as
was the vase of flowers in the summer,--a bouquet of spitzenbergs and
greenings and northern spies. A rose when it blooms, the apple is a
rose when it ripens. It pleases every sense to which it can be
addressed, the touch, the smell, the sight, the taste; and when it
falls in the still October days it pleases the ear.
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