Address of Welcome. 143 



at what they considered the foolhardiness of these sturdy settlers, and even 

 now they don't, or pretend not to, know what we have done. S. C. Evans 

 came five years later. He wrote to ex-Governor Downey, asking as to the 

 advisability of a move to Riverside. That worthy gentleman told him to 

 never undertake it, as it was a God-forsaken country. But, notwithstanding 

 this, men of intelligence, brain and culture saw a future in the place, and 

 they came here, and behold the result! And now let me say to you, when 

 you meet a woman who stood firm by her determination in these early 

 pioneer days of trial, uncover your head in her presence. 



The tradition some of them recently discovered, concerning our pet 

 orange, I think I had better give you : The nuptial festivities of Juno, queen 

 of the Olympian heaven, were graced by " ambrosial " fruit and vegetable 

 food, contributed by Terra, goddess of earth. So privileged was this fruit 

 that Juno committed it to the exclusive care of the three daughters of Hes- 

 perus, with a dragon to guard it in their far-off isle in the west. The story 

 of the most difficult of the twelve labors of Hercules, relating to the search 

 and finding of these apples of gold by Atlap, while Hercules shouldered the 

 world, is well known. From the stolen fruit brought by the strong god to 

 his tyrannical master, Eurystheus, have descended the degenerating oranges 

 of the world. 



The golden apple which Discord threw, in her anger, marked " for the 

 fairest," among the goddesses at the wedding of the father and mother of 

 Achilles, and which Paris awarded to Venus, Discord filched from the golden 

 tree of the H^sperides. Homer's glorious story of the Trojan war, which 

 sprang from thit award, does not record what became of the apple. Eecent 

 research in the archives of tradition, however, supply the needed light. Venus 

 loved the apple. She gathered its vitality and luscious qualities into her 

 cestus and made them a part of its substance. When the day of doom came 

 to the <)lvmpian hosts, bewailed by Schiller, but made the poet's joy in ' The 

 Dead Pan " of Mrs Browning, Venus fled, bereft of divinity, over land and 

 sea, round and round the world, an i lost her cestus in midair. It floated 

 slowly to the earth, dropping into an open, shallow seam, which soon closed 

 over it. Centuries passed before the wonderful cestus yielded to natural 

 forces, decayed, and set free the vitality and precious qualities which at once> 

 on gaining liberty, began growth in tree form to reproduce its kind. History 

 emerges from tradition now, and tells how a bud from the golden tree of the 

 Hesperides was brought by the way of Washington to the site of the "garden 

 planted eastward in Eden,'' whose " fruit of vegetable gold " is in our day 

 known as the Riverside Washington Navel. 



Allow me in conclusion again to welcome you most cordially to our city. 

 Don't feel timid about speaking to our people wherever you meet them. 

 They will be glad to meet you, and if you should find, anywhere, a door open, 

 please walk in and be at home, for every threshold extends its hospitalities 

 to you. I hope your labors among us may be productive of a vast amount 

 of good to you and to all. 



