Morning journal and courier., 1885-04-20

I bit it with great difficulty and little joy,
 sing hey, the leathery fungus that It was l
 handed it back to the boy and told him to
 keep it; he might want to kill a dog with it
 some day. The boy, with the native inde-
 pendence of his class, said that I didn't
 know good apple when I got one He
 opined, indeed, and very opinely, too, in
 loud tone of expression, for the benefit of
 the whole car, that when had any orchard
 fruit at home I regaled myself, like prince,
 on dry apples.
 did not smite the boy nor upbraid him with hard and stinging words. More, in- deed, in sorrow than in anger I told him did not know what good apple was, and knew where they used to grow, and more over, and if he would bring me one now my entire bank account, with all the heredita- ments, protests and overdrafts thereunto ap- pertaining, should be his. The only good apples in the world, lineal descendants of the golden stock of Hesperides, used to grow twenty-five or thirty years ago on an old farm three or four miles out of Peoria. H., on the Mount Holly road. I told the Eoy they were not always a fair apple to look upon in their early youth, when I loved them best. They were hard on one side and green the other. They were gnarly all the way round and sour all the way through. There was more heartaehe and sorrow and deep-seated gnawing remorse and heartfelt sorrow and honest penitence in one of those apples, after you had eaten a peck of them in the same afternoon, than there is now in a whole green watermelon.
 Nevertheless, used to go into the orchard at a. nl., eat apples till 11:30, and then feel hungry for big dinner.
 And I told the boy if he would bring me one of those apples now; with the same old taste and flavor that it had quarter of a century gone by; with the same old smell of the clover and apple blossom lingering about it, the same old breezes that kissed my boyish cheeks in the long, delightful, truant summer afternoon; with the whistle of the bob white over in the stubble fields beyond the COW pasture; with the murmur of the brook that went singing over the white pebbles at the foot of the orchard hill; with the music of the bees humming and buzzing about it in the sweet red clo- yer tops; bring them to me even with the old, well remembered and peculiarly pun gent flavor of the buggy whip, which ire quently seasoned those apples-because no boys could always get over the fence in time-I told him I would gladly, gladly, gladly give him fifty dollars for just one apple.
 less fear and backed off down the aisle of the car and touched the conductor on the elbow and said
 "Bill! Say, Bill! Who has charge of the lunatic on the wood box!'
 An, dearly beloved; there is no lunatic about it. We know now, and some day the boy will know, that apples are not good to-day as they were twenty-five years ago. Nothing is so good to us in fact. The apples are tough and favorless; the grass is wiry and thin where it used to be living vel vet under our feet; the days are not so long; the nights have grown colder; the stars shine less brightly and there are not so many of them. I counted them the other night and there are half a dozen missing; the cows don't come so early; the dogs crosse-; Christmas doesn't come so close apart as it used to. Everything changes except the cir GUS. So runs the world away. But it doesn't run away with a coachman, thank the gods. Which only goes to prove that the world is much prouder and better than the people who live in it.