The Golden Fruit

ambikajha

Jul 3

Of the fruits of the year I give my vote to the orange. In the first place it is a perennial if not in actual fact, at least in the green grocer's shop. On the days when dessert is a name given to a handful of chocolates and a little preserved ginger, when macedoine de fruits is the title bestowed on two prunes and a piece of rhubarb, then the orange, however sour comes nobly to the rescue and on those other days of plenty when cherries and strawberries and raspberries and gooseberries riot together upon the table, the orange, sweeter than ever is still there to hold it's own. Bread and butter, beef and mutton, eggs and bacon are not more necessary to an ordered existence than the orange. It is well that the commonest fruit should be also the best. Of the virtues of the orange I have not room fully to speak. It has properties of health-giving, as that it cures influenza and establishes the complexion. It is clean, for whoever handles it on it's way to your table but handles it's outer covering it's top coat which is left in the hall. It is round and forms an excellent substitute with the young for a cricket ball. The pips can be flicked at your enemies and quite a small piece of peel makes a slide for an old gentleman. But all this would count nothing had not the orange such delightful qualities of taste. I dare not let myself go upon this subject. I am a slave to it's sweetness. I grudge every marriage in that it means a fresh supply of orange blossom, the promise of so much golden fruit cut short. However the world must go on. Next to the orange I place the cherry. The cherry is a companionable fruit. You can eat it while you are reading or talking and you can go on and on, absent mindedly as it were, though you must mind not to swallow the stone. The trouble of disengaging this from the fruit is just sufficient to make the fruit taste sweeter for the labor. The stalk keeps you from soiling your fingers it enables you also to play Bob Cherry. There are only two ways of eating strawberries. One is neat in the strawberry bed and the other is mashed on the plate. The first method generally requires us to take a bent position under a not in a hot sun very uncomfortable and at any time fatal to the hair. The second method takes us into the privacy of the home for it demands a dressing gown and no spectators. For these reasons I think the strawberry is an overrated fruit. Yet I must say that I like to see one floating in cider cup. It gives a note of richness to the affair and excuses any shortcomings in the itself. Raspberries are a good fruit gone wrong. A raspberry by itself might indeed be the best fruit of all but it is almost impossible to find it alone. I donot refer to it's attachment to the red currant rather to the attachment to it of so many of our dumb little friends. The instinct of the lower creatures for the best is well shown in the case of the raspberry. If it is to be eaten it must be picked by the land well shaken and then taken. When you engage a gardener the first thing to do is to come to an understanding with him about the peaches. The best way of settling the matter is to give him the carrots and black currants and the rhubarb for himself, to allow him a freehand with the groundsel and the walnut trees and to insist in return for this that you should pick the peaches when and how you like. If he is a gentleman he will consent. Supposing that some satisfactory arrangement were come to and supposing also that you had a silver bladed pocket knife with which you could peel them in the open air, then peaches would come very high in the list of fruits. But the conditions are difficult. Gooseberries burst at the wrong end and smother you, melons as the boy discovered make your ears sticky, currants when you have removed the skin and extracted the seeds are unsatisfying blackberries are the faults of raspberries without their virtues plums are never ripe. Yet all these fruits are excellent in their season. But we could not live with them. Yet with the orange we do live year in and year out. That speaks well for the orange. The fact is that there is an honesty about the orange which appeals to all of us. It is going to be bad, for the best of us are bad sometimes-it begins to be bad from the outside not from the inside. How many a pear which presents a blooming face to the world is rather at the core. How many an innocent looking apple is harboring a worm in the bud. But the orange has no secret faults. It's outside is a mirror of it's inside if you are quick you can tell the shop man so before he slips it into the bag.