Winter Meeting. 215 



and your apples in the meal sack. Handle your fruit well, carefully 

 grade, closely pack it in attractive packages and make it as nice in 

 appearance as if you were going to ship it to some foreign market, 

 for I believe the people of your home market are just as good as 

 the people of anywhere else and like just as good fruit and will re- 

 spond to such treatment with a demand for more of such fruit than 

 you can grow. 



THE CULTIVATION OF THE SOIL— MY EXPERIENCE AND 



AIMS. 



J. W. Robinson, Springfield, Mo.) 



Agriculture is as old as man. Arid the first man Adam was the 

 first horticulturist; the garden in the East of Eden his own as a gift 

 from his Maker. Who, upon placing him in it said, "Dress and keep." 

 How exalted the calling and how dignified the labor in pursuing it, 

 since it was God given and directed. Realizing that it was not good 

 for man to be alone in the enjoyment of this rich inheritance. He gave 

 him Eve for a helpmeet. How happy this pair must have been while 

 in the enjoyment of their Eden home as they wrought among its 

 luscious fruits and fragrant flowers ; and how strange that they should 

 over-leap the bounds of His authority and thus abuse their high of- 

 fice and blessed privileges. (The Adams are not all dead yet, not 

 even in Missouri.) There was a tree in the midst of the garden, the 

 fruit of which they were forbidden to eat. It is supposed tO' have been 

 an apple tree loaded with fruit, beautiful to look upon and pleasant 

 to the taste. Such as our own Ben Davis or Jonathan grown to 

 perfection only here in the "Land of the Big Red Apple." Is it any 

 wonder that our mother Eve, whose bump of curiosity was over- 

 developed, should be tempted to taste one of those apples and having 

 done so and desiring her husband (woman like) to share its sweet- 

 ness with her, induced him to take a bite also. By this transgression, 

 then, came death and all our woes. The earth was cursed with thorns 

 and thistles and noxious weeds. 



Dark and gloomy indeed must have been the prospect to Cain — 

 the first agriculturist — when upon receiving his penalty as a murderer 

 he exclaimed : "My punishment is greater than I can bear." Ban- 

 ished from Eden, to face the ills of life, they went forth to toil and 

 sweat for their bread. From the days of this first tiller of the soil 

 to the present a war of subjugation has been waged against these 



