102 STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



things, and if your men folks are so bound up and so taken up 

 that they can't grow anything but apples, and you love the other 

 kinds of fruits, see that you and the boy and the girl have a 

 piece of land near the house and that the men folks plow it up 

 and put it in good shape for you, and that you have everything 

 in the fruit line that you can grow in the State of Maine, and 

 not only that, but encourage the children in fruit growing. 

 Keep them out of doors. Give them an opportunity to learn 

 what there is to be learned. Now is that advisable? And I 

 speak because my heart is in that question, and those of you 

 who know me know that the children do pretty near as I ask 

 them to do. We have two exhibitions a year that we appro- 

 priate $50 each for, and Horticultural Hall is not big enough 

 to take care of the exhibits of those children. I have been to 

 Boston, the Massachusetts Society's exhibition, I have taken in 

 every town and city that has requested me to take in their exhi- 

 bitions, and to judge and to advise and talk to the children, and 

 I do lots and lots of that kind of work. And I am going to say 

 in conclusion that I have two grandsons, one three and a half 

 years old and one five, that had a garden this year, and a garden 

 last year, and this year the five year and a half boy took the 

 second prize in Boston for the best collection of vegetables 

 grown by a child under sixteen years of age, and his grand- 

 father bossed the job so that he knows that it is as honest as 

 anything can be in this world, and that the children did their 

 own work excepting the plowing of the ground. I used to go 

 out with them and sit down and see them do the work. When 

 the little fellow was four years and a half old he says to me, 

 "Grandpa. I want some of that nasty, stinking stuff that papa 

 uses in his garden." And I said, "Well, young man, go and 

 get your tin pail — a pail that would hold four quarts perhaps — 

 and go down to the barn and get it." And he went down and 

 got it. "Now," he says, "how will I use that." "Well," I says, 

 "you have seen your grandmother and your mother make bread, 

 and scatter flour on the board. Now you scatter that nasty, 

 stinking stuff in that row just as you have seen your mother 

 scatter the flour when she makes bread." He went and did it. 

 I says "Do it over again, because you haven't got enough ; rake 

 it back and forth." Aftsr he shelled his corn, he said "What 

 will I do?" I put my foot there, and then there, and so on, 



