MARKETING AND STORING FRUIT. 133 



of fruit, when the old man remarked, " It's all very pretty, but 

 all wrong. Come with me," and he led the way to the farthest 

 corner of his grove, and there, with its lower branches lying 

 on the ground, also covered with the finest fruit, stood an 

 enormous orange bush, as it appeared to me, with its great 

 round head thickly studded all over with oranges. ' 'Now, " said 

 the old man, " that's the way to grow oranges, and were I plant- 

 ing another grove I would never put a knife to the trees. 

 That tree was a chance seedling which came up there, and 

 has never had a twig cut off." I opened the wall of leaves and 

 fruit to see how it looked inside. To my surprise, there was 

 not a leaf in the interior, nothing but the bare limbs and 

 smaller branches, all the twigs dried up and gone, pruned by 

 the dense shade. 



A few years later, a freeze came along, peeling the bark 

 from the tall straight bodies and killing every tree in the grove 

 except the big bush down in the corner. It stood all the at- 

 tacks of Jack Frost until 1886, when the thermometer fell to 

 five degrees above zero, freezing Galveston Bay over, when 

 the big bush was killed, root and branch. I will here say that 

 no tree takes more kindly to root-pruning than the orange. 

 If the roots are cut back to stubs an inch or less long, and the 

 body to about a foot after planting, ground well rammed and 

 tree let alone forever after, the big bush will be duplicated, 

 for such a tree is practically a seed, and will reestablish it- 

 self on several deep, strong tap-roots instead of on one, like a 

 seed. 



