FOURTEENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 1 2 1 



same thing. ]n my judgment, we have scarcely begun to eat 

 apples freely in this country. In the city of New York 

 alone, there are two and a quarter million people both of 

 whose parents were born on the other side, of the water, and 

 a large proportion of these people were not fruit eaters, 

 except in a very small way. They are now beginning to buy 

 fruit, and every one who begins to eat fruit in this country 

 en.ds by selecting the apple as his favorite. Even dowm on 

 the East side of New York, in the sw^eat shops, where people 

 toil all through the day and far into the night, at their sew- 

 ing machines you will find many a woman bent nearly double 

 over the machine with a part of an apple by their side. The 

 fruit which in former years was dumped into the river or 

 thrown away, is now bought up by Jewish peddlers and sold 

 to this class of people. This is a clear gain, not because the 

 grower gets anything for this fruit, but because of the educa- 

 tional side of it. These people will not be satisfied all their 

 lives to eat a rotten apple, or to gnaw around a womi-hole, 

 or to eat the hole, as many of them do. They will demand 

 more and better fruit as the years go on, and we shall live to 

 see a half million Jewash people, now^ in the city of New York, 

 among our best customers for good apples. 



I once saw an Italian prisoner taken out of a Police Court 

 and put into the Black Maria to be taken to Blackwell's 

 Island. He v/as chained to a string of men, and, as they 

 piled him into the wagon, his wife ran up with something 

 held under her apron. He reached out his hand for it, and 

 I found it to be a banana and two Baldwin apples ; so you 

 will see there is hope for the apple market, when an Italian 

 woman sends a Baldwin apple to prison with her husband, 

 in the liope of reforming him. But it is not to the large 

 markets alone that we will look to in the future. The local 

 markets have been neglected. There is a chance for devel- 

 oping tlu- smallest towns, or even in the country, if growers 

 will only look about for them and develop them. In fact, 

 it is in these local markets that the smaller growers may look 

 for their best sales. ]\fany of us have been in too much of a 

 hurry to rush our fruit over to the wholesale dealers in the 

 city, neglecting our neighbors and others, who, if thev were 



