108 TRANSACTIONS OF THE SOCIETY. 



ucts of the soil were mainly relied upon, both for refreshment and nourish- 

 ment. One of the verses is in this wise : — 



" Instead of pottage and puddings, and custards and pies, 

 Our pumpkins and parsnips are common supplies ; 

 We have pumpkins at morning, and pumpkins at noon, 

 If it was not for pumpkins wc should be undone." 



Nor did the praises of the pumpkin end here. Our fathers seemed to 

 have found in it an ingredient of one of their choicest drinks, as well as 

 the material of so much of their more solid food. They had no grapes 

 from which "to crush the sweet poison of misused wine," and yet, with 

 all their other virtues, they do not appear to have learned how to carry 

 through a feast, as we are now doing, upon cold water. Another verse of 

 the old song says, — 



" If barley be wanting to make into malt, 

 We must be contented and think it no fault ; 

 For we can make liquor to sweeten our lips, 

 Of pumpkins and parsnips, and walnut tree chips." 



That must have been a lip-sweetener indeed, Mr. President ! We have 

 all heard of bran bread, and even saiv dust has not been without its com- 

 mendations in some quarters, as a valuable esculent ; but neither the 

 genius of temperance, nor of dyspepsia, has ever, in our time, conceived 

 the idea of extracting an agreeable beverage from pumpkins and parsnips,, 

 and walnut tree chips ! 



All this, Mr. Winthrop said, went to prove that it was something of a 

 Horticultural exploit, on the part of his ancestor, to raise a good store of 

 pippins. It was one, at any rate, with which some of the younger branch- 

 es of the Genealogical Tree had nothing to compare. He could point to 

 no apples of his own raising. He could not even exhibit that variety of 

 apples, — the only sort which the society had not abundantly furnished to 

 our hand, — those " apples of gold set in pictures of silver," which the 

 Wise I\Ian of old had given as the synonyme of " a word in season ;" a 

 synonyme of which he was always reminded, when listening to the golden 

 words and silver tones of the distinguished friend, whom they had just 

 welcomed home from England. 



Mr. Winthrop said there was a time when he might have claimed some 

 fellowship with the cultivators of the soil. He had once eaten the produce 

 of his own dairy; but the experiment by no means proved that he knew 

 on which side his bread was buttered, and he was glad to fall back on the 

 excellent supplies of his friend Hovey. 



He had never cultivated flowers, not even the flowers of rhetoric ; and 

 as to the sentimentalities of the subject, Mrs. Caudle had quite exhausted 

 them in a single sentence of one of her last lectures, where she told her 



