ELEl'ENTH ANNUAL MEETING. 69 



just handled 75 Ijushels of Mr. Hitchings' fruit and he certainly 

 deserves a great deal of credit for what he has done. I have 

 selected specimens from a great deal of fruit that he had in 

 storage this year. On our government experiment we had 

 some 75 bushels, and I noticed in looking over these speci- 

 mens that they w-ere not exaggerated specimens at all. — they 

 were about his average. I am glad to say that. After hand- 

 ling over 75 bushels of them I felt that I got fairly acquainted 

 with them. And I want to tell you another thing. 



Here is one of the secrets of his success. When I went up 

 there on one occasion he was away from home. I went out 

 in the orchard on his place wth some members of his family. 

 Two little fellows took me all around and they pointed out the 

 different varieties. One of them was six and the other eight. 

 It was astonishing the knowledge those little fellows displayed. 

 As they went through the orchard with me they would say. 

 "Here is Mcintosh," "here is Jonathan," "here is Ben Davis." 

 and so on. They pointed them right out to me. And they 

 made comments too. "Here is one of the finest apples on the 

 place." "And here is another." 



Let me tell you, friends, that there were two boys, one six 

 years of age and the other eight, telling me all this, and it did 

 not take me long to come to the conclusion that there was a 

 Pomological bent in that whole family. 



I agree with what Mr. Hale says. A good deal of the success 

 of Mr. Hitchings is due to the fact that he is just chock full 

 of pomology. He is just chock full of good apples. He can't 

 raise anything else. 



The President : Do we want to follow up this apple question 

 any further? 



Mr. T. S. Gold : Here in Connecticut, and I suppose it has 

 never been denied, we have the largest apple tree grown in the 

 United States. Where was that grown? In a plowed field or 

 in a cultivated field ? So far as I can learn, it was grown in 

 soil which had never been disturbed from the time the tree 

 started to grow, and it grew to be a great, magnificent specimen 

 when it had reached its full maturity. It was over here in the 

 town of Cheshire, and it lived to be over one hundred years 

 old. It grew where the plow had never touched the soil and 

 where nothing had ever disturbed the soil about its roots. 



