MEMORIAL HOUR, JOHN S. HARRIS. 329 



The President : Now there will be an opportunity given for any- 

 one to speak one minute on any one of the four whose names appear 

 on the program, or of all four together. We would like to have 

 him occupy just a minute in saying what he has thought of these 

 men, what anybody would wish to say on an occasion like this. 



Mr. Oliver Gibbs : Fellow members, I feel as though I could not 

 let this occasion pass without adding my own words to help make 

 up the record of the life of Mr. Harris. I could not say what I wish 

 to say in one minute. I will not undertake to traverse the ground 

 covered so ably, properly and eloquently by Mr. Owen, but I wish to 

 call attention to a few of the characteristics of Mr. Harris which 

 made him what he was. He was the best all round worker we had 

 in our society. The portrait we gave him four years ago is now 

 smiling down upon us. First, Mr. Harris was a man who could do 

 any amount of work that to another one would seem impossible. 

 Second, he knew that the only success in life was to undertake to do 

 anything just as well as he could do it. Hence he was always thor- 

 ough in his work. When we gave him a subject to investigate, his 

 report will show without exception that he returned an encyclo- 

 pedia on the subject so far as his time and opportunity would permit. 

 Another thing was his dogged perseverance in pursuit of knowledge. 

 Another was his alertness to catch everything that came to his at- 

 tention. You remember how he used to sit here with his note book 

 and put down everything of interest, not content with our usually 

 very accurate report, but he always kept his own notes for reference. 

 Do you remember the very last words he spoke at this meeting? 

 One member said he thought the old members should be more retir- 

 ing and not take such a prominent part, but finally he concluded the 

 better way was to work away as long as they could. "Yes," said 

 Mr. Harris, partly rising from his chair, "and die with our boots 

 on." Mr. President, the ink was scarcely dry upon Mr. Harris' last 

 work upon an agricultural paper here before we heard he was dead. 

 The very last horticultural report contained his name ; "he died with 

 his boots on." He took them off when he was ready to leave this 

 shore, but he put them on in the morning when he reached the other 

 side, and that impression tells me that he is at work on the other side 

 the same as he always was here. 



Mr. S. M. Owen : I want to say, Mr. President, that it seems to 

 me something should be said of this most excellent man, Capt. Jud- 

 son N. Cross, upon this occasion. He was not so well known to you 

 as was Mr. Harris, but he ought to be better known to you, a great 

 deal. He was a man of most charming personality ; then, too, he 

 was a man of infinite patience and invariable courtesy. He pos- 

 sessed geniality and kindness, but the chief quality that should en- 

 dear him to all of us who are engaged in promoting the cause of 

 fruit and flower, plant and tree, is the fact that he found within his 

 busy and exacting avocation, that of a lawyer, plenty of time to give 

 thought and work to the cause that we hold dear. Prof. Green has 

 said that Capt. Cross did this great work for the forestry interests 

 of this state at a time when we needed legal talent to help along in 

 that work, but it was not legal talent alone that Capt. Cross brought 

 into that work, his heart was bound up in it over all. He felt the 



