It has been truly said that a country is poor indeed when it is so poor that dried apples become a luxury. Before the days of cheap sugar and canned fruits, dried apples and cider apple sauce, the latter made of apples boiled to a pulp in cider, were luxuries and necessities both in many places besides ours. Apples were always abundant and cheap in Dallas. In fact, when the forests are cleared away, apple trees are found to spring up spontaneously in some places, and only need a little trimming and protection to become good orchards. This fact was accounted for to the writer by the owner of one such orchard as follows: He said a good many people had marveled at the natural growth of his orchard, and had asked him how he could account for it. “Of course you know,” said he, “that it has always been my habit to give such things a good deal of thought. I could never be satisfied, like most folks, to just sit down and take things as they come without trying to understand them, and I always keep at them until I cipher them out. Now, you see it’s just like this about these apple trees: Some day or ’nuther, probably millions of years ago, this hull country was overflowed by the ocean. That’s plain enough to any man who takes the trouble to think about these things. Well, right about over here somewhere there has been a shipwreck some day, and a ship load of apples has sunk right here, and these apple trees have sprung from the seeds. You know a seed will keep a great while and then grow.” The work of paring the apples and removing the cores for an ordinary family’s winter supply of dried apples and apple butter, before the days of machines for that purpose, was a task of no little magnitude. All had to be done by hand and as sometimes happened, many bushels had to be so treated. It was a task that would have occupied the working portion of an ordinary family several days, and thus much of the fruit would, from long keeping, have lost its value for cider appliance by becoming stale and partly dried. For this reason there seemed almost a necessity for calling in help sufficient to do the required amount of work in a very short period of time. The apple cut solved this difficulty successfully. When a family had once determined on having an apple cut, it was given out to the nearest neighbors, and from them it spread of its own accord for miles around. Those who heard of it could go if they chose to. No special invitations were required. The apple cut was an evening festivity, and was most “prevalent” just after buckwheat thrashing, when the nights were cool and the roads not very muddy. I am told that in later years it began to be considered “bad form” to go to an apple cut without special invitation; but apple cuts were degenerating then, and they died soon after when the apple parer in its present improved form was introduced.