AND HIS PLANT SCHOOL 163 



been sent to be trained for further usefulness, and when 

 they saw the improved peach pupils, with their large, 

 delicious fruit, they surely had faith in the teacher. But 

 the master knew he had a difficult task, for the ancestors of 

 these foreign trees had never produced peaches of value. 

 For hundreds of years they had been grown in their native 

 land for the beauty of blossom and foliage. The fruit they 

 bore had a rough pit, and was small, tasteless, or bitter. 



It was many years before the master succeeded in train- 

 ing the Japanese trees to bear, but at last it was accom- 

 plished by pollination and selection. All Japanese peaches 

 are subject to a disease called curl-leaf. These flowering 

 peaches were crossed with the productive sweet Muir, 

 which is not greatly troubled with the disease. After a 

 long series of selections a tree was raised which grows six 

 times as fast as the flowering peach, and when spring comes 

 it is wreathed with extremely large double blossoms of 

 brilliant rose pink. These blossoms are nearly three inches 

 across. When the tree is in full bloom it looks like a bower 

 of roses, and when the fruit ripens it is of a superior quality, 

 as large as the Muir, and an excellent canning peach. 



Thus, as this stranger from the Mikado's garden has 

 grown more useful, it also has become more beautiful, and 

 another new fruit has been added to the long list of grad- 

 uates from the plant school. 



