TWENTIETH ANNUAL MEETING. i 23 



place long enough to eat the fruit, somebody else will, and 

 some child will be happy some day. So I took a joy in 

 following in the footsteps of Johnny Appleseed, the famous 

 westerner, who threw apple seeds into the soil, from which 

 have come some of the best apple trees they have to-day. 

 Then I had to abandon that, and take the trek to the 

 land of the setting sun, and there we saw the two climates, 

 first the beach sand country, where they raise raspberries 

 and blackberries by the carload and by the trainload, and 

 where we saw the apple orchards and the other orchards 

 growing there in the moist climate. And also saw in that oth- 

 er climatic zone east of the Cascade Mountains, in Plast 

 Washington, where they have a long winter and a hot sum- 

 mer, where the soil is a volcanic ash that has been sifted 

 down from those mountains in ages past and has been rot- 

 ting there in the providence of God, waiting for the sons of 

 Connecticut to come and take possession of the fruit coun- 

 try. And there in that volcanic ash is a soil that seems to 

 be fitted to grow fruit of great size and great productive- 

 ness. And I have seen there the growth of trees, rapid 

 growth, I can't begin to tell you, because I am sure you 

 would not believe me. of the size of the apples, the produc- 

 tiveness of the trees, and the beautiful fruit, and yet, like 

 beauty, only skin deep, so far as value is concerned. For, 

 after all, we long for the taste of the good old New Eng- 

 land apples, the Baldwins and Hubbardstons, Non-Such, 

 and the Rhode Island Greenings; we long for the spiciness 

 and the juiciness of the New England fruit. And I want 

 to say this, that while they raise a whole lot of fruit and 

 send a lot of fruit to the New York markets, and send a 

 good deal across the ocean, that there is a vast amount of 

 fruit that goes to waste out there l)ecause of the lack of 

 markets. They can send their best profitably the long- 

 distance, but vast (|uantities of fruit rot under the trees. I 

 have seen peaches and a])ricots and cherries, f have seen 

 small fruits galore, and an endless quantity of apples in 

 long winrows, tons upon tons, rotting simply because 



