138 STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



At first I patronized borne industries. I bought strawberry plants 

 of Mrs. Ramsour, and J. B. Price not only sold me fruit trees, but set 

 them out in my own yard. For awhile they flourished finely, but the 

 washerwoman, with her big kettle, in a fit of abstraction, forgot her 

 fire. The flames crept stealthily along from one leaf to another, catch- 

 ing a dry twig here and a bit of brush there, till they reached my Flem- 

 ish Beauty, wrapping it in a fatal embrace, and it went up in a chariot 

 of fire. Then the hydrant sprung a leak and dripped, dripped contin- 

 ually down around the roots of my brave Bartlett till it went down to 

 death, drowned, poor thing ! My peaches did bear one year, nearly 

 half a bushel. Now they are not even an ornament to the landscape, 

 for last winter's below zero weather froze the sap in their veins and 

 five of the eight are dead, fit only for firewood and not so cheap as coaL 

 The hot sun dried up my strawberries, the rain washed the gravel 

 down upon them, the chickens scratched them up by their roots, and 

 the hoe did not cultivate them. In six months not one was left to 

 tell the tale. 



Then, seduced by the glowing representations of J. Lewis Child* 

 and dazzled by the vivid pictures in his magazine, I ordered several 

 dollars' worth of trees from Floral Park — pears, plums, cherries, yes; 

 and even currants, with a couple of dozen roses warranted to bloom 

 the first year. He had made arrangements with the express companies 

 for cheap rates, so he said. As I paid about half as much for express 

 as I did for the trees I wondered what full charges would have been. 



I hired a man to plant them out. He brought rich dirt to put 

 around their roots ; he dug holes broad and deep ; he straightened out 

 the little fibres as he placed the trees in proper position, and firmed 

 the ground with his feet. Everything was done according to the books. 

 And they grew. But the next spring a Nebraska blizzard came down 

 from the North and froze nearly every green thing. There are two of 

 those trees left — a Japan plum and a Vermont Beauty pear; but I shall 

 never eat of their fruit ; not that I expect to depart this life suddenly^ 

 but I am sure they will. Do you remember that unfortunate person 

 in Lalla Rookh, of whom Tom Moore sings so pathetically — 



" Who never loved a dear gazelle 



To glad her with Its soft bright eye ; 

 But when it came to know her well 



And love her, It was sure to die." 



So do my trees. The roses I planted and petted with my own fair 

 hands, as the novelists say. I brought fertilizers by the bucketful 

 from behind my neighbor's barn to put around their roots ; I watered 

 and watched them and waited for the blossoms. It was the same old 



