Addresses — Blight. 165 



•were thousands all around it. It killed the main portion of the 

 trees on that three-quarters of an acre; ihis was the first blight 

 that made its appearance. I went to work and cut off all the 

 blight. It struck in again immediately, and did greater damage 

 than before. The next season I let it work its own way mostly, but 

 it took another plat of ground that just cornered with that, of about 

 the same size. It too had been highly cultivated before planting, 

 and the trees were tolerably small and all of one variety. The 

 other plat contained probably fifty or more varieties, of which 

 scarcely a tree escaped the first season, and very few the second 

 season. In neither of those years did it return back to the same 

 ground. 



Adjoining was ground that had been in grass for several years; 

 the two first years no blight appeared on the grassy part of the or- 

 chard; the third year the blight was there, and not on the culti- 

 vated portion. Then I had another orchard, where the ground had 

 never been plowed; the trees were on raw land, and were sur- 

 rounded by timber; the blight struck in there at a furious rate and 

 hurt them badly. I had another orchard, separated entirely from 

 the others, where the wind blew from one lake to another; it lay 

 just between the largest lobes of the lake, in an open space. On 

 that the blight kept away until the fourth or fifth year, but there it 

 came finally. There had been no manure there at all; the ground 

 was in cultivation until the trees began to blight, and some is in 

 cultivation yet; there they blighted as badly as they did on any 

 portion of the farm. Sometimes the blight would attack some of 

 the trees, and you would only see it on the leaves; or it would at- 

 tack the fruit, and the trees and the leaves remain sound. In other 

 places the poisonous matter would strike on the body of the trees 

 in places as large as my hand; then again it would girdle them 

 evenly around, and after girdling, some would run down into the 

 ground and leave the top of the tree growing; in others it would 

 leave the bottom unharmed and run up to the top; in others it 

 would run both up and down. A year ago last summer the greatest 

 mischief was done. The wind was coming from the west, and 

 passing diagonally across this orchard that stood between the lakes, 

 struck in my dooryard. The space where it entered the dooryard 

 -was some thirty or forty feet wide, but the position of the trees was 

 such that the current of air was concentrated, and nearly burned 



