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"Will you tell me about it?" He was nothing loth. The wind, the place of perished tombs, the very wild-blown locks of this 'withered apple-john', were eerie accompaniments to the tale he piped in my ear: "When my grandfather were a boy," he said, "there lighted in Dunburgh Exciseman Jones. P'r'aps the village had gained an ill reputation.
"Those dear dirty dates," she calls them, but I cannot share her liking for them. Although the cart is a beguiling market, dates so bought are too dusty to be eaten. They rank with the apple-john. The apple-john is that mysterious leathery fruit, sold more often from a stand than from a cart, which leans at the rear of the shelf against the peppermint jars.
For myself, although I do not eat apple-johns, I like to look at them. They are so shrivelled and so flat, as though a banana had caught a consumption. Or rather, in the older world was there not a custom at a death of sending fruits to support the lonesome journey? If so, the apple-john came untasted to the end. Indeed, there is a look of old Egypt about the fruit.
"Night before last on the six-fifteen, and me getting home late from the Epworth meeting fire out not a stick of kindling-wood in only two cakes in the buttery, neither of them a layer not a frying-size chicken on the place thank goodness he didn't have the appetite he used to though in another way it's just downright heartbreaking to see a person you care for not be a ready eater but I had some of the plum jell he used to like, and the good half of an apple-John which I at once het up and I sent Mehitty Lykins down for some chops "
Washington, are like two merry wives of Windsor; but as to Jemmy Madison, oh, poor Jemmy! he is but a withered little apple-john." Odd characters congregated then in Washington as now.
Perhaps like many of its betters, it remained unheralded and unknown all through its fresher years and not until the coming of its wrinkled age was it at last put up to the common view. The apple-john sets up kinship with an author. The day of all fools is wisely put in April.
Whether my fondness for gazing at apple-johns springs from a distant occasion when as a child I once bought and ate one, or whether it arises from the fact that Falstaff called Prince Hal a dried apple-john, is an unsolved question, but I like to linger before a particularly shrivelled one and wonder what its youth was like.
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