Vermont State Horticultural Society. 65 



remarkable thing about this region. During several years' ex- 

 perience, I have never seen a foggy morning in June, July or 

 August. 



I am not advertising any of this land for sale, but when 

 the facts about it which I have spoken of are well known, it 

 will be worth five times as much as it is today. I have often heard 

 my mother say that when she was a child she often saw cows 

 being pastured on what is now Boston Common. That was 

 about seventy years ago. The time is coming when the people 

 who succeed us in this Champlain Valley will no more think 

 of pasturing cows and planting corn upon these orchard lands 

 than the present Bostonians would think of doing the same 

 upon their sacred common. 



A friend of mine, a Scotchman, who came to America when 

 he was quite young, a short time ago went back for a visit to 

 that little town where he was born. When he returned the most 

 imiportant thing he had to say was this : the people took him 

 out to show him a great curiosity, an apple tree. It was a little 

 tree with about a bushel of fruit upon it, such as we sell for 

 cider for five or ten cents a bushel. The owner of the tree was 

 guarding the apples with great care ; and, when asked w4iat he 

 was going to do with them, replied that he would sell them for 

 four-pence a pound, and he did. That is $12.00 a barrel. We 

 sometimes wonder why the English people buy our apples. They 

 have to, because they can't raise them. And they can't raise 

 them because they have so little sunshine. If an Englishman is 

 rich he sets a trap to cateh what little sunshine there is. He 

 encloses a garden with a high brick wall, ten or twelve feet high, 

 so the sunshine cannot get out when it once gets in. Along the 

 north wall of that garden he sets out a little row of trees, apples 

 and pears and peaches, and trains them up against the wall, 

 flattens them out as flat as a sheet of paper, so each tree resembles 

 a fan. Thus they get a double supply of what sunshine there 

 is, and he succeeds in growing a few specimens of very poor 

 quality, which we w^ouldn't eat. He can raise wonderful goose- 

 berries in his climate, and we can't in ours. I am willing that 

 he should have the goose-berries, give me the Northern Spies. 

 Therefore he must buy his apples of us. What is true of Great 

 Britain is practically true of all northern Europe. Along the 

 Mediterranean they have plenty of sunshine, but in that tropical 

 climate they can't grow northern fruits ; and so we have nearly 

 all Europe for a market. For this is a land of sunshine, from 

 the Atlantic to the Pacific, from Canada to IMexico, it is emphatic- 

 ally a land of sunshine. 



How prone we are to look down under our feet for all of 

 cur blessings, and how little inclined we are to look up. We 



