THE MINNESOTA 



HORTICULTURIST. 



VOL. 30. DECEMBER, 1902. No. 12. 



THE PRESIDENT'S GREETING. 



( At the Annual Meeting, 1901.) 

 W. W. PENDERGAST, HUTCHINSON. 



First I want to say a few words by way of greeting to the 

 members of this society at this, their annual meeting. It is a great 

 pleasure to me, and I have no doubt it is a great pleasure to every 

 one of you to meet here year after year as you do. Otherwise you 

 would not go to so much pains and expense and take up so much 

 of your time in attending these sessions. It must be that there is a 

 pleasure in it, for there is always a pleasure in being of service to 

 some one else. If we should go back over our lives, look through 

 the album that was clean and white at first and pick out the pages 

 that we should like to dwell upon and look at, it would be the pages 

 that would record the good that we had done, something that we 

 had accomplished for those around us something that showed that 

 we were true philanthropists in the noblest sense of the term. 



From the humblest beginnings we have come to be — and I say 

 it without any spirit of boasting, but it is perhaps because we were 

 driven to it by the strenuousness of the situation in which we found 

 ourselves — but at any rate we have come to be the largest society of 

 this character in point of numbers in the whole United States ; larger 

 than a dozen others that we might select all put together; larger 

 than half a dozen state societies as they will average through the 

 country, and the number is still growing. Today we have some- 

 thing between 1,000 and 1,100 members on our list. (Applause.) 

 This is something to be proud of. We have looked forward within 

 the last few years to the time when we thought we might reach that 

 point where we could use a one and three naughts to express the 

 number on record as members of the society. We have passed that 



