AN APOSTOLIC APPLE.
In a very lovely garden in the West Country flourishes what I should think is the most various and interesting apple tree in the world. It is young and lusty. It carries twelve flourishing grafts. Each of these springs from a specially hybridised seed ; and the crossing was designed with a single and distinctive purpose. Now there is a French cider apple, Medaille d'or, possessed of peculiar virtues. Its flowers and leaves, both, come out so late that they evade almost all the common enemies of the apple, the May frosts as well as the May bugs and flies. It laughs at Saint Bonifacius and the Three Icemen, who hold festival in the second week of May, and it scorns the Capsid fly or winter moth, because its lateness brings it beyond the date of the hatching time. On a similar principle our gardeners now dodge the activities of the carrot bug by sowing a portion of the crop in the summer after the caterpillar has become a cocoon and has gone into retirement.
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