1 16 THE CONNECTICUT POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 



Is it not much better to keep them home and keep them 

 partners than to let them go away and become competitors? 

 The splendid success of the fruit growing in the West is 

 due to young men who have left Virginia and Connecti- 

 cut. And I would like to come back and see you again in 

 six years from now and find every young man who is old 

 enough to be in the business of fruit growing, a partner 

 with his father in Connecticut in that business. (Ap- 

 plause). 



I have often said that no man can be a successful 

 fruit grower unless he is constantly finding in his 

 orchard, specimens of fruit too good to eat. In other 

 words, there is a sentiment about it, and I don't believe that 

 any man can make a successful fruit grower unless he also 

 makes of himself a better man, having in mind the poetic 

 side, the sentimental side, of fruit growing. Some years 

 ago I happened to be in the Congressional Library at Wash- 

 ington, and I ran across there a little couplet addressed by 

 one of your good New England poets to a lady friend who 

 presented him with a basket of grapes. The sentiment in 

 that poem was so fine, and the expressions so true to life, 

 that it has always remained in my memory. John G. Whit- 

 tier, when he wrote the lady who gave him the basket of 

 fruit, said to her : 



Last night, just as the tints of antumn"s sky 

 Of sunset faded from our hills and streams, 

 I sat, vague listening, lapped in twilight dreams, 

 To the leaf's rustle, and the cricket's cry. 

 Then, like that basket, flush with summer fruit, 

 Dropped by the angels at the Prophet's foot, 

 Came, unannounced, a gift of clustered sweetness, 

 Full-orbed, and glowing with the prisoned beams 

 Of summery suns, and rounded to completeness 

 By kisses of the south-wind and the dew. 



Thrilled with a glad surprise, methought I knew 

 The pleasure of the homeward turning Jew, 

 When Eschol's clusters on his shoulders lay, 

 Dropping their sweetness on his desert w'ay. 



