But you did not pay any attention to their warnings; and, though they spared no pains, those apples were not able to save their baby seeds from being wasted by your greediness.
But there was still one thing they could do to prevent your eating many more green apples, and wasting more half-ripe seeds. They could punish you so severely for having disobeyed their warnings, that you would not be likely very soon to do the same thing again.
And this is just what they did.
When feeling so ill and unhappy that summer night from all the unripe fruit you had been eating, perhaps you hardly realized that those apples were crying out to you,—
“You would not listen to us, and so we are punishing you by making you ill and uncomfortable. When you saw how green we were, we were begging you not to eat us till our young seeds were ripe. When you felt how hard we were, we were trying to make you understand that we were not ready for you yet. And, now that you have eaten us in spite of all that we did to save ourselves and our seeds, we are going to make you just as unhappy as we know how. Perhaps next time you will pay some heed to our warnings, and will leave us alone till we are ready to let our young ones go out into the world.”
So after this when I show you an apple, and ask you what you know about it, I fancy you will have quite a story to tell,—a story that begins with one May day in the orchard, when a bee went flower visiting, and ends with the little brown seeds which you let fall upon the ground, when you had finished eating the rosy cheeks and juicy pulp of the apple seed case. And the apple’s story is also the story of many other fruits.
SOME COUSINS OF THE APPLE
The pear (Fig. [13]) is a near cousin of the apple.
But perhaps you did not know that plants and trees had cousins.