GREETING BY A CHARTER MEMBER. 431 



very much interested in them, but that was as far as any idea of 

 horticulture went with me. When I was offered a position to 

 canvass for the sale of nursery stock, it seemed to be the best 

 thing I could do, and I started out. 



I talked with the farmers from farmhouse to farmhouse, 

 and before the season was out I concluded that Rochester, New 

 York, was not the place to grow trees and vines to plant on the 

 Minnesota prairies. So you see I reached the right conclusion. 

 When I came to make delivery that fall at Wabasha, one of the 

 men who had ordered some Hyslop crab trees, — and by the way, 

 those had been grafted on some old cull trees in the nursery and 

 they were two, three or four years old roots with a one year's 

 growth, and had thrown out a lot of side limbs — the man asked 

 me how to trim those trees. I took out my knife and showed him 

 how to trim them, and he thought that while I was about it I 

 might as well finish trimming and I did. 



When I got through I had a nice bunch of sprouts lying on 

 the ground. I gathered them up and tied a string around them. 

 There was something like ten or twelve hundred trees I deliv- 

 ered, and I offered to trim every one of them, and I got those 

 scions. I knew a woman, Mrs. Barton, at Zumbro Falls, who had 

 shipped to her from New York three barrels of apples. She in- 

 sisted that the children save every apple seed, and she planted 

 all of those seeds in the garden. She had raised some fine apple 

 seedlings. I traded for some of her seedlings and planted them 

 in Mrs. McDonald's garden, at Wabasha. I am proud of this 

 fact, that of the four thousand odd Hyslop crabs I grew from 

 those trees, a large per cent., are still alive and growing in the 

 state of Minnesota. 



Like a great many others, the next year I got married, and 

 I went out on the prairie in southern Minnesota and was going 

 into the nursery business on a big scale. I invested every dollar 

 of money I had in apple seedling roots and scions of Hyslop, 

 Transcendent and Duchess of Oldenburg. That was in the year 

 1868. I worked all winter grafting in a small room with a hot 

 fire. It was a very cold, hard winter — I wasn't strong or healthy 

 anyway — with the result that when I had my winter's work 

 packed away in a dirt cellar under the house, I was taken sick, 

 and I didn't get off the bed for two months. When I finally 

 did get up — my wife wasn't looking — I staggered across the 

 floor and opened the door that went under the stairway to the 

 cellar, and I was confronted with a box of my root grafts floating 



