STATE POMOLOGICAL SOCIETY. 99 



'Yes, when thy heart in its pride would straj- 

 From the pure first loves of its youth awa}-. 

 When the sullying breath of the world would come 

 O'er the flowers it brought from its childhood's home- 

 Think thou again of the moody glade 

 And the sound by the rustling ivy made — 

 Think of the tree at thy father's door. 

 And the kindly spell shall have power once more!" 



A WOMAN'S WORK IN ORCHARDING. 

 IMary Augusta Bass, Wilton. 



When your secretary asked for a paper giving the experience 

 of my sister and myself in orcharding, my first thought was that 

 such a paper would be short and uninteresting. But after a 

 little consideration of the subject I found it a longer tale than 

 I had imagined. 



The original seven acres of our orchard land was purchased 

 by my father, Mr. S. S. Bass, with the first money earned by 

 him after he became of age. He afterward added adjoining 

 land making in all a tract of about twenty-five acres, seven 

 acres of which was wood land and the rest grass and pasture 

 land. 



He did not begin to plant trees until about 1870 after he had 

 moved to Wilton village. The trees were set, a few at a time, 

 during a period of twenty or twenty-five years, until the eighteen 

 acres of cleared land bore nearly nine hundred trees. For many 

 years he devoted to the orchard only the time which he could 

 spare from his other business but as the orchard grew and 

 required more attention, he became more and more in love with 

 the work and came to have a firm belief in the future success of 

 the business. He set native trees of natural fruit because he 

 thought them more hardy than New York trees. More than 

 half of them he grafted to Baldwins and nearly all the rest to 

 Harveys and Ben Davis. All kinds of orchard work he did 

 with his own hands — setting the trees, grafting, trimming, 

 mulching, fertilizing, bridge-grafting, spraying, fighting insects 

 and mice, harvesting, packing, shipping. About ten years ago 



