MassacJui setts Horticultural Society. A7\ 



Well, Mr. President, having thus sketched to their foundations, the 

 works to which you have referred, by an infliction of unentertaining remarks, 

 for which you may in some measure blame your own kindly disposition, I 

 dare say you are impatient to have me conclude with the expression of some 

 sentiment, or commentary, indicative of the feelings produced by all that 

 we have seen, and all that we now see, exquisite and admirable in the 

 way of rich and choice fruits and flowers — ripe and half ripe, in full bloom 

 and half blown. And truly, ladies and gentlemen, the difficulty is not to 

 find, but to select and present a single one, out of the crowd of lively im- 

 pressions that must fill the mind and the heart of every beholder, and espe- 

 cially of the strangeis who have come for the first lime within the gates of 

 Athens. Would you have us speak, Mr. President, of the vast and mag- 

 nificent display of Horticultural skill, and industry, which but yesterday 

 ornamented all these tables before us, with attractions hardly less graceful 

 and splendid than that which surrounds them now — a display to which you, 

 sir, may forever look back with the proud reflection. Yes, sir, I had proposed 

 to make a rough sketch — a sort of outline of what I should see ; but, sir, 

 when I did enter this room, with all these long tables groaning — no, not 

 groaning, but exulting — under their load of choice and magnificent fruits and 

 flowers, all thought of description was at once abandoned. Why, a de- 

 scriptive catalogue of the ap/>/fs a/one, contributed by my friend here, Mr. 

 French, would make a paper as long as the long table they almost covered 

 from end to end. I was at once struck up, as Major Jack Downing, of 

 Downington would say, and confounded ; I felt, for all the world, as that fair 

 Queen must have done, when she said unto the gallant king Solomon — I 

 had heard much, and my expectations were wrought to the highest pitch, 

 but since I have come to see what you have in all their magnificence, I find, 

 "the half hath not been told me." Oh, no, sir. The pen that describes 

 that exhibition, should be in the hands of a Loudon, or a Downing, or of 

 my too kind friend, General Dearborn, or, if you pleased, your own, Mr. 

 President, if you will allow me so to say, or of a Hovey, or my friend Breck, 

 erewhile Editor of the good old New England Farmer. 



Mr. Skinner then paid a merited compliment to several of our most emi- 

 nent statesmen, historians, scholars and merchants, whom he embodied in 

 the names of Webster, Prescott, Everett, and Lawrence. 



W^ell, sir — not daring to venture on a description of your Horticultural 

 exhibition, which we all came to see; nor to pourtray, in the colors they 

 deserve, a few among your many great and good men, should I venture on 

 the yet more dangerous task of any thing like an adequate expression of 

 what we strangers, whom you have honored with your welcome, must say, 

 when we go home, as well as we can say of the yet more magnificent dis- 

 play you have so wisely, if not so cunningly, contrived to get up of the Fair 

 sex of old Massachusetts ! Ah, no, Mr. President ; you have involved this 

 humble advocate and worker at the Plough, the Loom, and the Anvil, in 

 difficulties deep and wide enough already — that task must be left to some 

 much more finished scholar — some gentleman of acknowledged discrimina- 



