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Updated: May 25, 2025
Just as from the earth everything was pushing up, unfolding under the soft insistent fingers of an unseen hand, so were his heart and senses being pushed, unfolded. He got up and broke off a spray from a crab-apple tree. The buds were like Megan shell-like, rose-pink, wild, and fresh; and so, too, the opening flowers, white, and wild; and touching. He put the spray into his coat.
He said, 'For Heaven's sake, turn red or blue, Sir Lupus, for if you don't we'll hang you to a crab-apple and chance the color. And father said, 'I'm no partisan King's man'; and Jack Mount said, 'You're the joker of the pack, are you? And father said, 'I'm not in the shuffle, and you can bear me out, you rogue! And then Jack Mount wagged his big forefinger at him and said, 'Sir Lupus, if you're but a joker, one or t'other side must discard you! And they rode away, priming their rifles and laughing, and father swore and shook his cane at them."
She took off the great apron and led the way from the kitchen, the boy following her with dragging feet. Under the crab-apple tree she drew him down upon a bench beside her. The orchard blooms shut them in close. The stillness was unbroken save for the warm sibilant droning of the insect life in the air. The shadows on the orchard grass were like lace-work.
"Did you say civil?" said Roly Poly; "don't mention civil in the same sentence with him; he's the man that put the crab in crab-apple." "He's got a dandy orchard, though," said Pee-wee. "Sure, this is a part of it," said Roly Poly. "Good night," said Pee-wee; "I don't blame it for going away from him. Can he take it back? It's an island now and it's part of Bridgeboro.
And this unhappy fancy fixing itself in his head, as he searched for it everywhere with the lanthorn of desire, it grew in four seconds from a picktooth to a pole, from a crab-apple to an Indian pumpkin, from barber's embers to a glass furnace, and from a dwarf to a giant; insomuch that he thought of nothing else than the image of that object encrusted in his heart as stone to stone.
They came to a hut built of the bark of trees and branches; a large crab-apple tree spread its branches over it, as if it intended to pour all its fruit on the roof, upon which roses were blooming; the long boughs covered the gable, where a little bell was hanging. Was this the one they had heard?
Evidently he found the alpine summer short and felt it necessary to step lively. Altitude, that convenient scapegoat of tenderfeet, did not seem to affect his wind or his endurance. He stacked his harvest in one corner of the field from which he cut it. He cut flowers along with the grass. Perhaps he used them for flavor as grandmother put rose-geranium leaves in her crab-apple jelly.
The fruit, according to him, is about an inch and a half in diameter, and is intensely acid. Yet they make fine sweetmeats, and also cider of them. He concludes, that, "if, on being cultivated, it does not yield new and palatable varieties, it will at least be celebrated for the beauty of its flowers, and for the sweetness of its perfume." I never saw the Crab-Apple till May, 1861.
We're going to have our pictures in Boys' Life and everything and we're going to have all the apples when they're ripe and maybe we're going to call ourselves the Crab-apple Patrol! Maybe there's treasure buried here, how do we know? And we're going to get one of those things a saxophone or whatever you call it to take our latitude and longitude with!
Nevertheless, our wild apple is wild only like myself, perchance, who belong not to the aboriginal race here, but have strayed into the woods from the cultivated stock. Wilder still, as I have said, there grows elsewhere in this country a native and aboriginal Crab-Apple, "whose nature has not yet been modified by cultivation." It is found from Western New York to Minnesota and southward.
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