PEAR TREE OF 1632 51 



dozen northern spys and three crab apple;. In the front yard, close to 

 the house, was a seedling apple tree at least twenty-five years old that 

 deserves an epitaph, especially as by encroaching on its roots in enlarg- 

 ing the farm house we unintentionally killed it. For several seasons it 

 bore bountifully apples weighing a pound or more each. They had 

 bright reddish skins streaked with green, were deliciously tart, and fine 

 keepers. The rare combination keenly interested and completely phased 

 every pomologist to whom I submitted specimens, including my old 

 friend Dr. Hexamer who credited me with owning the apple of the 

 future, and I had just completed arrangements for its propagation in 

 a large way when it died. A second Concord grape success was lost 

 to the world when that nameless seedling pound apple tree died 

 unscioned, and failure number ten, a most humiliating one, went into 

 the record book. 



Pear Tree of 1632. 



We sent a special agent to the Governor Thomas Prence 

 homestead at Eastham, on Cape Cod (the Thomas Prence who came 

 over in the good ship Fortune, and was later one of the early Gov- 

 ernors of Plymouth Colony) and obtained scions of that oldest 

 pear tree in the United States, as on three former occasions. 

 Affidavits from "that oldest inhabitant" assured us that they were 

 taken from the tree brought from England in or about 1632. They 

 grew and thrived, and though the fruit was small and gnarly, the 

 charm of history and romance surrounded it, for undoubtedly from the 

 same stock ate John Alden and Priscilla Mullens, that doughty war- 

 rior, Myles Standish, and many others of the little company who paid 

 that first memorable visit to New England, December 22, 1620. We 

 christened this pear the Mayflower, as eating it carried us back to the 

 days of cone-shaped hats, wide collars and knickerbockers ; to the time 

 when little things were mighty things, in sharp contrast with these 

 latter days when mighty things are to us little things. Newly 

 awakened forces advance, vanguarded by electricity and radium, 

 unknown, sleeping giants then, but today though barely awakened 

 more than equal to the enormous burdens that man in the arrogance 

 of his divine right to rule matter is heaping upon them. 



The Site Makes or Ruins. 



The same farmer who plants his apple trees close together often 

 opens both house and barn gates across the highway and builds his 

 home unpleasantly near it, barns and outbuildings sometimes really 

 edging the dusty road, all false economies, forgetting that if the house 

 is set well back and on rising ground, if only in a rough pasture lot, his 

 property is lifted beyond ordinary farm competition, and can be made 

 extremely attractive and more valuable at small expense. I have in 

 mind two ordinary houses that I moved back from the highway a 

 couple of hundred feet into the centre of a rugged hillside at a cost 



