be twisted from its fostering twig; the grape
bunch nipped from the ragged brown branch
bound to the green-house roof. The best
things refuse to be transplanted. What French
custom really retains healthy life in England,
what English custom really thrives in France?
But let us ransack the Cornucopia of Pomona,
and tumble out the fruit, dishful by dishful.

The raspberry is almost the earliest fruit of
the year in France, and it lasts on the French
table from the end of April to the end of
September. Here nature is less generous with the
fine flavoured dark crimson berry. How pleasant
it is to pick the pulpy raspberries that
often come off the stems as you touch them,
and leave white, bald, and pithy stalks, like
hat pegs from which the hats have fallen.
What fragrance there is in the seed, how
refreshing the smell as you bruise the berries,
and their nectareous blood reddens your hands.
The raspberry is balsamic, refreshing, and
eminently wholesome, though delicate people call it
cold, and consider that it requires sugar and wine
to correct its effect on the stomach. As it is a
shame that Milton and Shakespeare should be
associated with the weariness of school tasks, so
is it a thousand pities that the mature man
should have his mind poisoned against that
fragrant, fine flavoured, and delicious preserve,
raspberry-jam, by the horror of youthful
powders—cruel alliance, hideous ambuscade!
—lurking wickedly under beguiling sweets.

It is a curious fact, and one that does not
redound to the credit of French confectioners, that
even as late as 1805, raspberry-jam was unknown
in France! A cookery book of that date says
distinctly—and no commentator, however much
a special pleader, can explain away the matter:—
"They have tried to make compotes and
confitures of raspberries, but hitherto" (mark the
remarkable and stultifying words, gentlemen of
the jury), "HITHERTO without success. The
fire carries off almost all the perfume." Carries
off, quotha! Why no preserve in the world
has such a bouquet.

Cherries look very well at a dessert arranged
in quadrangular pyramids—pyramids of rubies
and cornelians—piled like cannon shot on the
terrace of a Chatham battery. A standard tree
laden with rosy May Dukes just after a shower,
and shimmering in the sunshine, is a sight to
remember. So must the jewels have grown on
Aladdin's trees in the subterranean garden.
The little dark Kentish cherry, with its black
juice, is a mere wild fruit compared with that
rustic beauty the red and white May Duke
or the lordly bigaroon. The best cherries in
Paris come from the pleasant valley of
Montmorency. The "guignes" and the "short-tailed
gobets," are also good and estimable kinds. The
invalids, croaking again, declare bigaroons to
be indigestible, and guignes heating; but this
is nonsense. The French dry cherries in the
oven, make dragées of them, and preserve them
in vinegar. In brandy we all know them.
They give the spirit a delicious flavour, but the
tawny fruit, so generous that it gives away
everything, becomes itself a mere brown tasteless
sop.

The apricot is a delicious fruit: not brimming
with scented cool juice, like the peach, but more
like a fruit that has done its best to turn into a
preserve. The nutmeg apricots, freckled and
small, are of a fine flavour, but not so refreshing
as a peach, nor so nectareous as a nectarine,
but still very pre-eminent. The French excel
in apricot marmalade, and at Clermont and
Auvergne they make an apricot paste, cheese
we should call it, which is quite a grand article
of commerce.

The standard apricot, which has the sun and
air all round it, and grows in a natural way,
bears little orangey fruit, preferred by great
connoisseurs to that of espaliers, though they
run smaller. The skin should not be removed
from apricot preserve; it is full of flavour, gives
variety, and serves to embed the white almondy
kernels, which contrast with the luscious golden
fruit. The espalier fruit is seldom ripe all the way
round. The apricot makes a delicious ice, and,
when dried and stewed (this is the famous Mish-
mish of the Egyptians), it forms a fine change
for convalescents, as it is free from acidity and
is nourishing and emollient.

Gooseberries (as schoolboys we always called
them, with affectionate familiarity, gooz-gogs,
but why we never knew) are the same as what
the Scotch call "honey-blobs." So we read in
the history of Lord Lovat, who stopped and
bought some when on his way to the Tower,
where the axe was grinding for his rascally old
neck. The gooseberry is the chief constituent
part of English champagne, and it is supposed
to account partly for the vast yield of the
vineyards of Epernay.

A gooseberry is not a pretty fruit; it is
hairy, like a harmless little bantling hedgedog;
it has not the transparent cornelian jewelled
character of the white or red currant; it has
no purple grey powder of bloom on it, like a
plum; it is just a bag of syrupy pulp and
whitish and greenish seeds: a bag which you
squeeze as you do shaving cream from the
collapsible tube. Boys liken ugly blonde
persons' eyes, when they are dead and insipid and
lack lustre, to boiled gooseberries; and the
chins of immature hobbledehoys, when first
beginning to sprout in a callow sort of way, have
been playfully compared to the same featureless
fruit. The Westphalians make a sauce of
the gooseberry, to flavour the raw ham they
devour in a cannibal sort of way. The ingenious
French play all sorts of tricks with the
gooseberries. They crystallise them, they pulp them,
they strain off the seeds; they preserve them,
they make a fine jelly of them, which is
peculiarly useful in fevers; they make a liqueur,
a syrup, and very excellent ices. But, for all
that, an English gooseberry pudding with a
thin paste, and a little butter inserted under
the uplifted crown of its hat, is a thing not to
be despised.

The strawberry deserves a special place of
honour in our dish of fruit, for does it not melt at