The Fruit-Farm and the Young Folks 229 



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■ ro-day is overlooked; all is to-morrow. When 

 " nesting-time comes for the young folks they find 

 themselves in an uncongenial world, and migration 

 is escape. Acres of fruit, thousands of trees, but 

 no room for the new nest on the fruit-farm. So 

 the yoimg people of the Fruit Valley fly to other 

 valleys, and there build up associations for 

 themselves. 



That supreme dictator of every fruit valley, 

 climate, has never changed his methods or his 

 might. Storm and sunshine, heat and cold, frost 

 and snow, the gorgeous simrises and yet more gor- 

 geous sunsets, the sweep of air from the hills 

 to the lake, from the lake to the hills, and up and 

 down the Valley are to-day as they ever have been. 

 All generations of men are prisoners of its climate. 



Then there are two that remain, soil and the 

 man. Changeable or unchangeable? New men, 

 new minds. Each generation is itself, unique, 

 distinct, functioned unto its own day. The pioneer 

 was not the child of our to-morrow, nor can he of 

 the next generation be the pioneer. Each after 

 its kind is the law. The man with the ax building 

 the log-cabin cannot be the man with the check- 

 book building the country house. 



What of the soil? It seems but yesterday that 

 I cleared away the primeval woods; cutting down 

 giant chestnuts and walnuts; trimming the logs, 

 hauling them to the mill for lumber. All the rest 

 burned — limbs, branches, underbrush, decaying 

 and falling trees, and the great stumps which first 



