120 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



"Live while 3-011 live, the epicure would say. 

 And seize the pleasures of the present day. 

 Live while you live, the sacred preacher cries, 

 And give to God each moment as it flies. 



Live while you live, 

 All nature cries, live while you live." 



God has placed within our reach, not only what is necessary to sustain life, 

 but such as will make it pleasant and enjoyable. Among those things not 

 really necessary to sustain life, but which will add to its enjoyments, are the 

 small fruits. 



And, notwithstanding what others may say or think, I will try to show you 

 that it is no more trouble to grow them than onions, cabbage, corn, or potatoes. 

 Some one may say, I do not relish small fruit. If you do not, you have no 

 right to be selfish. There may be one or more of your household who do. And 

 shall we do nothing to please them, and make their days more pleasant as they 

 are passing along life's highway? If you have any regard for their health or 

 comfort, or your pocket, don't compel them to tramp through your own or your 

 neighbor's fields, bedrabbled in the morning dew, to hunt the scattering wild 

 berries, when better ones can be raised in your own garden, in the place of those 

 weeds, and where they can be picked at leisure. 



Of the small fruits the most important and easiest of cultivation arc the cur- 

 rant, the strawberry, the red and black raspberry, the blackberry, the 

 gooseberry, the cranberry, and the grape. 



If wo except the currant, it is not many years since their cultivation as a 

 crop, or even as a family luxury among farmers, was thought of. Many of us 

 doubtless, have vivid recollections of tramping meadows for the strawberry, 

 creeping through the brambles for raspberries and blackberries, at the expense 

 of hands and clothes, of climbing grape trees, as we called them, at the imminent 

 peril of our limbs if notour necks; of traversing marshes, and running the 

 gauntlet among massasaugas, to pick the cranberries. 



But since plaster has come into more general use, wild strawberries have 

 vanished. Since sheep husbandry has become so general among us, the bram- 

 bles or briars have gone mostly. With the introduction of better varieties, the 

 wild grapes seem sour and undesirable. 



Don't think because you have a good " berry patch" set out that you are all 

 right, nothing more to do in that line, your troubles at an end. I tell you nay ! 

 unless you hoe, your hopes will perish as the weeds grow. Neither let us think 

 that because our more thoughtful neighbor has a good patch of berries, that we 

 and our children have only to go and eat them and say "thank you." It is 

 astonishing, as friend Purdy of the Fruit Kecorder said, "how fond they are of 

 such things, when in a neighbor's garden." 



And we might say of our thoughtlessness or indifference to the little wants of 

 the little ones in this matter, "that the inhumanity of man to man (children), 

 makes countless thousands mourn." 



Many of us, heads of families, seem to feel or act, if we are not as bold to 

 say it was Louis the XIV., when he asserted that he "knew perfectly well what 

 the state wanted, since he himself was the state." 



I have given you a few of the reasons why you ought to raise small fruits, 

 now let me endeavor to tell you how to raise them. 1 will give no fancy plan, 

 but a plain common-sense way of doing it. 



And let me begin with that king of the small fruits, the currant. There are 



