324 MINNESOTA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY. 



JOHN S. HARRIS, THE MAN. 



( An oration. ) 

 S. M. OWEN, MINNEAPOLIS. 



At this hour of commemoration — a holy hour it should be — 

 there is a realization of an existing void here, of a vacuum that 

 nature, with its traditional abhorrence of such a condition, refuses 

 to fill, that was never before felt in the councils of this society. A 

 personality is missing today that never was missed before upon a 

 similar occasion. He, who was a god-father at the birth of this 

 society, who was a loving and tender nurse in the weakling days of 

 its infancy, who was an elder brother helping to direct its steps into 

 paths of influence, power and usefulness as it grew into youthful 

 virility, and who was a proud parent when this, the child of his 

 love and solicitude, had developed into vigorous maturity, giving 

 promise of long life and of perennial beneficence, is for the first time . 

 absent from the roll-call of our membership. This causes the void, 

 produces the vacuum, creates a vacancy that refuses to accept a new 

 tenant. 



This absent one is our grievously lamented guide, counsellor and 

 friend, our highly esteemed and beloved fellow member and brother, 

 John S. Harris. Never before absent, never truant or tardy even; 

 and nothing but the cold and sapless hand of death, beckoning 

 him the other way, could make him so now. 



Throughout its long life every meeting place of this society has 

 been a Mecca to him whose memory we now commemorate, and this 

 society has been the shrine in the Mecca before which he bowed in 

 love and adoration to the god of fruit and flower that he loved to 

 worship. Unlike the ordinary pilgrim devotee, he did not bring 

 his faith alone to this shrine, but he brought zvorks to prove that his 

 faith was well founded. He had the faith of the most enthusiastic 

 zealot, but it was not the faith of mere proclamation. He brought 

 here the evidences of his own and others' achievements to prove that 

 his faith was not built upon the sands, but, rather, upon the rock of 

 demonstrated truth. 



Mr. Harris believed that, 



"If faith produced no works, I see 



That faith is not a living tree. 



Thus faith and works together grow, 



No separate life they e'er can know." 



His faith in the ultimate adaptation of fruits of required char- 

 acter and quantity to this region was one of his many rare and 

 admirable qualities. I recall my first interview with him. It was 

 after a winter that had so devastated orchard, vineyard and berry 

 patch in this state, that it almost seemed like a notice served from 



