Tenth Annual Meeting iii 



farm ; and all the paupers and the poor people are taken to 

 this farm. They go and get them. A man with four children 

 notified the selectmen that he could not support his family, so 

 they went with the wagon to take that family; the four 

 children were bundled into the wagon, and the pauper himself 

 went on his bicycle. Now that means that when even the 

 paupers have the means to own and ride bicycles, that was 

 the greatest evidence of prosperity I ever saw.' I agreed with 

 him. I don't believe you can find that outside of New 

 England, and I don't believe you can find that outside of 

 that apple-growing district up in Maine. 



''Now just one more rub. Mr. Garfield tells us that in 

 London he found the people eating California peaches. I won- 

 der where it was that the California peach picked up that won- 

 derful flavor they tell about. To my mind it is worse than the 

 Ben Davis apple. I can't understand why a man should want 

 to eat one a second time. I can imagine his eating one; just 

 one, or half a one, but I can't understand where there is a man 

 that should eat two. Where, and how it was that these Cali- 

 fornia peaches picked up that magnificent flavor we hear about 

 I don't know. I wish that he was here so that he could tell 

 us. I would like to know how that was done. 



''Mr. Garfield said one more thing which was true. He 

 said that he dug up information, and that he would give it to 

 anybody he could, or anything, to broaden and deepen the 

 respect for our farms and their products. That is true. I have 

 two boys at home, and I have been trying for the last three 

 years to teach them to have respect for the common things on 

 the farm. My own example, apparently, was not strong, so I 

 gave them books, and I gave them Brother Hale's articles in 

 'The Rural New-Yorker,' but I didn't seem to make much 

 progress until I finally bought a thoroughbred Berkshire pig with 

 a pedigree several miles long, and with hams and shoulders 

 strong enough to bear the pedigree up. I don't know whether 

 it was the pedigree, or what it was, but the idea of handling 

 something which was better than they had ever seen before; 

 the idea of handling something which had blue blood in it, or 

 the idea of handling something which had a pedigree, — it all 

 seemed to appeal to them, — and from that day to this they have 



