ANNUAL REPORT. 281 



L. J. Grant. Warehouse Point, second prize for best plate 

 Westfield apples; second prize for best plate Roxbury Russet; 

 second prize for best plate Gilliflowers. 



C. I. Allen, Terryville, third prize for best six bunches 

 natiye grapes. Also third prize for best display of native 

 grapes. 



" The Music of the Apple. " 



In its blossoms sing the bees, accompanied by the melodies 

 of the winds. Boreas and Zephyr woo its petals of pink and 

 white. Song-sparrow and thrush drain dew from its budded cup 

 and pay in amorous madrigals amid bowers of tinted snow. 



Its calyx closes not by day or night, greeting alike the orb 

 which, ages ago, smote Memnon into marvelous harmonies, and 

 the morning and evening stars and all the singing spheres. 



The ripened fruit on blazing hearth lisps music learned from 

 bee and bird, and mimics the farmer's chuckling laugh as the 

 peel crackles before the burning log, while the housewife's pliant 

 of slumberers in love with sleep is reproduced in sputter of the 

 roasted rind. 



The sizzling skin recalls the cricket's drowsy chirp, and. 

 imitates the iteration quaint of unconfuted katydids. 



From the mouth of the gorged press gushes forth, in honeyed 

 streams, juice of petal, bud and flower, that unseals humanity's 

 poet-lips to chant in zephyr-song, in bird-note and in brook-tune. 



Stripped and spiced, sliced and sugared, and then by deft 

 fingers tucked away in clothing made of waving grain, it sings to 

 the oven glees of autumn, summer, spring. Carved with precision 

 by housemaid, wife or spa attendant, the fruit of Pomona and 

 the product of Ceres hymn their swansong beneath the tickled 

 palate of delighted man. 



But, above all these symphonies, the enraptured orchardist 

 hears the tinkle of the gold and of the silver coin, no less tuneful 

 than the rune of rivulet, the murmur of bees, the liquid music- 

 drops of birds and cadences of summer showers. Lustrous to his 

 eyes are the minted heaps, yellow as the sunbeams or frost-white 

 as star-shine and moon-gleam. Welcome, too, the banknote's 

 crinkle and as delicious to his ear as the rustle of leaf and blos- 

 som, when the wind wandered amid the orchard lanes. — Front the 

 Boston Globe. 



