TWENTIETH ANNUAL MEETING. 12 1 



I have a feeling that I will have to go to raising fruit. 

 ])eache,s or apples. Some people think ministers raise only 

 lemons. But we who have been tossed from pillar to post in 

 the ministry, beginning in the Middle West, continuing in 

 Massachusetts, and then removing to the far Northwest, and 

 back again to Connecticut, realize that w'e have no settled abid- 

 ing place. Somehow^ as we sit here and look into your faces 

 and realize how the roots of your lives are striking down into 

 the good old state of Connecticut permanently, just as vour 

 noble apple trees are getting deeply rooted in the wonderful 

 soil of this state, w^e are filled with envy, and we feel some- 

 how that this must be the last place, and we must get a little 

 closer to the soil, and we must strike the roots down more 

 deeply and have an abiding place. Man lost the Garden orig- 

 inally by being tempted with an apple in the hands of Satan, 

 and that best thing of all the earth, the apple, was used as a 

 temptation. But now it would seem, in the fullness of time, 

 as though God were luring them back into the Garden with 

 the apple, the most precious fruit that he can find. (Applause.) 

 I look into your co^itented faces and realize that you are not 

 in the grip of the monopolists, you do not seem to be deeply 

 furrowed in brow, you have not the cares and worries that 

 some of the folks who live in the city and are tied up to the 

 will of fate, are obliged to worry along under, and I want to 

 congratulate you. I have gotten as near as I could get to you 

 by paying my little dollar and giving my name to )Our secre- 

 tary of the Pomological Society, and after becoming a mem- 

 ber have begun to eat of the pleasant fruit of fellowship this 

 evening. 



I am here, I suppose, to tell you how to raise fruit, and 

 I want to say in the first place, that my interest in fruit 

 growing began long before I was born, when my father 

 planted apple trees up in the old town of Groton, ]\Iass. 

 Those apple trees are now bigger than I am, and that is 

 going some. (Laughter). My earliest recollection is of 

 the joys of climbing the big apple trees in my^ grandfath- 

 er's orchard in Massachusetts, getting my mouth full at 



