182 HAMPSHIRE. FRANKLIN, AND 



not be necessary more than two or three times. When taken 

 out of the press, it is turned and buttered every day until 

 cured. 



Goshen. 1851. 



Fruits and Vegetables. 



While advancing years bring the fraternity of husbandmen, 

 with their experience enlarged, and their means and processes 

 improved to realize more and more nearly their ideal of a per- 

 fect horticulture, and a perfect agriculture, they must needs, in 

 the same degree, bring increased perplexity to those whose duty 

 it is, to discern the hair's breadth of difference between the 

 choicest productions here brought in competition. By what 

 infallible instinct are we to discover inequality, where sunshine, 

 shower and science have daily descended with impartial copi- 

 ousness, to warm, water, and enlighten the intelligent industry 

 of all ? 



Instead of the slender collection of some seventy plates of 

 fruits, all told, on the strength of which, some five years ago, 

 the Northampton Horticultural Club ventured to challenge the 

 attention of the county, that department this day enumerates 

 six hundred and seventy parcels, every one more rich and lux- 

 uriant than the former, and all justifying a pretty large preten- 

 sion on the part of the club, to take rank among the "progres- 

 sive " institutions of these latter times. 



It would afford us much satisfaction, did our limits permit, 

 to enlarge upon the history and operations of this club, that its 

 example might be known and followed by all men. ; Its influ- 

 ence upon fruit cultiu'e in this immediate neighborhood is 

 scarcely to be calculated. Old soils that before the club broke 

 ground, were here and there found too debilitated to germin- 

 ate even a respectable weed, at once became endowed with 

 a new spirit of vegetation, and from that time forth have given 

 abundant earnest that they are equal to any effort at reproduc- 

 tion. Old trees too, that had long ceased to remember when 

 they l^st blossomed, and whose haggard and withered trunks 

 and limbs seemed to cry out for some such thing as an agricul- 



