42 :5TATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



After a very short discussion, in wliich Mr. Gulley said that Mr. Liuderman's 

 experience was always put by himself very modesth', and with no exaggeration, 

 the meeting was entertained by the following delightful address, delivered by 

 Henry W. Lord of Pontiac, entitled 



EVERGREENS, 

 THEIR USES FOR ORXAMEXT AXD ECONOMY OX THE FARM. 



In Eastern, ancient and desolate regions where there is no evergreen, but 

 where an over wearying gray desert sand shimmers and tires the eye, the hot 

 earth trembling beneath tlie scorching sun as if all the centuries tliat looked 

 down from the ])yramids had not yet reconciled tliose blistering plains to the 

 eternal fires that descend upon them out of heaven — a colorless land where there 

 are no brooks, no lakes or rivers, no grass, no vines, no trees ; where some of 

 God's creatures, by act of special creation, arc i)rovided with extra water tanks 

 in their stomachs, the only sources from which they may drink during long 

 intervals of time. 



To the Oriental traveler whom sad disaster, following fast and following 

 faster, has finally driven as a punishment for his restlessness to such a clime, 

 that biblical figure in which Isaiah the i)ro])liet likens the refuge tiiat sinful 

 souls may find in the Prince of Peace, to ''the shadow of a great rock in a 

 weary land,"' has a graphic and startling significance that can never reach us 

 here, wreathed as we are in flowers and fed with fruits. 



"Here fragrant herbs their odors shed; 

 Ilere creeps the healing phmt." 



As removed from and contrasted with that hind where the first act of hospi- 

 tality is to offer the wayfarer, if you would entertahi angels unawares, a vessel 

 of water in which to cool his feet, here, "with verdure clad,"' our 



" Sweet fields across the swelling flood 

 Stand drest in living green. 

 As to the Jews fair Canaan stood 

 While Jordan rolled between." 



These distant, desolate regions which really exist, and in which people of the 

 human race actually live and rear sons and daughters, have prompted and aided 

 the imaginations of poets and writers of fiction to portray in some of their 

 immortal works other scenes of still greater desolation, and have planted them 

 with trees that are im])crishablc and yet never green. 



Edgar A. Poe, in one of the saddest of his dismal songs, imagines a descent 

 into nether regions, and, as Saint Paul said of a man he knew — whether in the 

 body or out of the body he could not tell — who was caught up into Paradise, 

 so Poe, whether in the body or out of the body, he could not tell, but he thought 

 he was wandering side by side with Psyche, his soul : 



"Here, once, through an alloy, Titanic, 

 Of cypress, I roamed with my soul — 

 Of cypress, with Psyche, my soul. 

 The skies they were ashen and sober, 

 The leaves they were crisped and sere; 

 It was hard b)' the dim lake of Auber, 

 In the misty mid-region of AVior, 

 It was down by the dark tarn of Anber, 

 In the ghoul-haunted woodland of Wier." 



