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raised more than two hundred bushels of delicious fruit, apples, pears, plums, 

 peaches and grapes, in a garden of a little more than an acre, which six years 

 before had hardly a tree of cultivated fruit upon it. You need not fear that 

 the best of fruit will become a drug. The more abundant, the more certain 

 the channels to market. Let me remind you that before all of our children 

 are laid in the grave, cities which can be reached in twelve hours from any 

 part of this county will have grown up containing half a million of Inliabi- 

 tants, and affording insatiable markets for fruit. We can be prepared to fur- 

 nish those markets, and enjoy the pei-petual profit, or reject it. Fruit should 

 be cultivated for health. Ripe fruit is nutricious, refreshing, and highly con- 

 ducive to health and longevity. In large cities during the prevalence of 

 cholera, and at critical periods, fruit is forbidden, not so much because ripe 

 fruit is deleterious, as because ship loads of fruit in great markets are gather- 

 ed and transported before it is ripe. It is rendered palatable by the mellow 

 of incipient decay, and not delicious by m;;ture ripeness. Hence there is an 

 unpleasant ascidity, a toughness and staleness in the pulp of much of the 

 fruit sold in towns, which is not found in ripe fruit just plucked from the 

 bough in your own garden with all the glow and flush and plumpness of life 

 upon it. From your own garden you can enjoy a cheap and delicious luxuiy 

 which a townsman cannot purchase at any price. The cultivation of fruit 

 kindles a taste akin to a taste for the fine arts, and is eminently conducive to 

 refinement, and constantly prompts to the acquisition of varied, curious and 

 profoundly scientific knowledge relative to the laws of decay and growth, 

 the preservation, propagation and development of vegetable life. It will 

 render a home more beautiful, more genial, more attractive — an object I have 

 just endeavored to enforce. What different ideas do we instinctively form of 

 a country dotted all over with luxuriant orchards groaning under their abun- 

 dance, and a country whose roadsides present a dreary and sterile waste. Let 

 the orchards of a people rival in beauty and brilliancy that which was pic- 

 tured on the imagination of Milton when he described the garden of our first 

 parents. 



" And higher than that wall a circling roAV 

 Of goodliest trees loaden with fairest fruit, 

 Blossoms and fruits at once of golden hue. 

 Appeared with gay enameled colors mixt : 

 On which the sun more glad impressed his beams, 

 Than in fair evening cloud, or humid bow. 

 When God hath shower'd the earth ; so lovely seemed 

 That landscape." 



Where the orchard of a century has grappled its roots, we believe the family 

 has grappled also. Owner and orchard we are apt to regard as venerable 

 portions of a venerable country, and the natural progeny of a state where 

 law and industry and taste bear sway. 



Some refrain from planting orchards for fear of plunder. You .should re- 

 member that the same brutal disregard of your rights, which tramples down 

 your crops, and robs your orchards, would rifle your pocket books, and plun- 



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