The apples must be sorted now and then, to remove the decaying ones; if the fruit was carefully sprayed, handled and graded in the first place and not too ripe, the necessity of frequent sorting will be considerably reduced. But in any case, the keeping of apples, except under good cold-storage, is at best a process of continually saving the most durable fruits. An "outside cellar," if properly ventilated, usually is a good place in which to keep apples. With the use of furnaces for heating and the cramped quarters of city apartments, the keeping of apples for home supply is constantly more difficult. There is no apple like the one that comes up fresh from the cellar on a winter night, cool, crisp, solid yet ready. It is the fruit of the home fireside. I often wonder whether one in a hundred of the people know what a really good and timely apple is. The yield of an apple-tree depends on many factors,--age, size, thriftiness, care it has received, whether it has escaped frost and other injuries; and some varieties are much more prolific than others. Some apples are "shy bearers," and for this reason soon are lost to propagation unless they have some superlative merit; Yellow Bellflower is an example of a shy, or at least an irregular, bearer. The great commercial varieties are of course good bearers, as Baldwin, Ben Davis, Stayman, York Imperial, Oldenburg, Rome, McIntosh, Wealthy, Yellow Transparent, Jonathan. An apple-tree at full bearing is a wonderful sight at the harvest, particularly in such varieties as McIntosh and Baldwin, in which the fruit is highly colored and hangs well toward the outside of the tree-top. While the first bearing year may yield only a half dozen fruits, the crop increases rapidly with the added years,--one peck, one bushel, five bushels, ten bushels, thirty bushels, even to sixty and seventy bushels on large sturdy old trees of some varieties. The amateur, however, first prizes the quality and regularity of his product for the sheer joy of it; then every added bushel is so much to the good. XVII THE APPRAISAL OF THE APPLE-TREE Now, therefore, in these sixteen little chapters have I tried to explain what I feel about the apple-tree. It is a version to my friend, the reader, not a treatise. As the interpretation is in the realm of the sensibilities, so do I aim not directly at concreteness. Yet as it is now the fashion to "score" all our products by a scale of "points," I make a reasonable concession to it. But I do not like the scoring of the fruit independently of the tree on which it grew as if the fruit were only a commodity. I know we cannot bring the tree to the exhibition-room, yet the perfect measure, nevertheless, is the tree and the fruit together. In these later times we have said much against the use of the museum specimen to the exclusion of the living object in its natural place: let us be cautious, then, that we do not forget apple-trees in our studies of apples.