Fig. 302. These are the flowers that make the apples. How many clusters are there?
Beneath the three dead apples, is still another dead one. Notice how shrivelled and dried it is, and how the snows and rains have beaten away the little leaves from its tip. The three uppermost apples grew in 1902; but this apple grew in some previous year. If I could show you the branch itself, I could make you see in just what year this little apple was borne, and just what this branch has tried to do every year since. This branch has tried its best to bear apples, but the fruit-grower has not given it food enough, or has not kept the enemies and diseases away.
The lesson that I got from my walk was this: if the apples were not good and abundant it was not the fault of the trees, for they had done their part.
In the cellar at home we have apples. I like to go into the cellar at night with a lantern and pick apples from this box and that—plump and big and round—and eat them where I stand. They are crisp and cool, and the flesh snaps when I bite it and the juice is as fresh as the water from a spring. There are many kinds of them, each kind known by its own name, and some are red and some are green, some are round and some are long, some are good and some are poor.
Fig. 303. The apples are usually borne one in a place, although the flowers are in clusters. Why?
Over and over, these apples in the cellar have been sorted, until only the good ones are supposed to remain. Yet now and then I find a decayed heart or a hollow place. The last one I picked up was fair and handsome on the outside, but a black place and a little "sawdust" in the blossom end made me suspicious of it. I cut it open. Here is what I found ([Fig. 306]). Someone else had found the apple before I had. Last summer a little moth had laid an egg on the growing apple, a worm had come from the egg and had eaten and eaten into the apple, burrowing through the core, until at last it was full grown, as shown in the picture. Now it is preparing to escape. It has eaten a hole through the side of the apple, but has plugged up the hole until it is fully ready to leave. When it leaves it will crawl into a crack or crevice somewhere, and next spring change into a pupa and finally come forth a small, dun-gray moth. This moth will lay the eggs and then die; and thus will be completed the eventful life of the codlin-moth, from egg to worm and pupa and moth. But in doing all this the insect has spoiled the apple. The insect acts as if the apple belonged to him; but I think the apple belongs to me. I wonder which is correct?
Fig. 304. The Baldwin apple. How many kinds of apples do you know?
