HOME GARDEN FRUITS 49 



Upon no members of the family or of the district in those days 

 was the influence of choice fruit so profound as upon the boys. 

 Setting aside mothers' testimonies as biased we may perhaps accept 

 the popular \iew that boys are voracious animals, but it is slander- 

 ous to accuse them of haA'ing undiscriminating tastes, accepting 

 all as grist that comes to their mills. If the confession of one of 

 them, now grown up, be insisted upon he would be forced to admit 

 that he could always find the choicest specimens of the choicest 

 varieties not merely in his father's and his near, and more or less 

 dear relatives' plantations, where he normally would be expected 

 to be welcome by day, but in a very considerable range of territory 

 and at hours when his elders had relegated their vigilance to less 

 somnolent watchers, dogs, to be explicit, with which, however, he 

 made it a point for obvious business reasons to be on terms of 

 intimate friendliness. 



The Ontario village in which my boyhood was spent is typical of 

 hundreds of that day from New England to Michigan and as far 

 south as Maryland, if not of a much wider area. Practicall}' every 

 home had its garden and fruit plantation, which often consisted of 

 an acre or more. Here I had unlimited range in five fruit planta- 

 tions, my father's, my grandfather's and those of three uncles, 

 and a more restricted range in many neighbors' gardens. Each of 

 these had been planted to meet the personal taste of the family and 

 to furnish a liberal supply of fruit throughout the whole year. 

 Often the last of the apples would be taken from storage when the 

 first strawberries were gathered. 



Again, since the smallest of these plantations was more than an 

 acre set in the interplanted plan popular in those days, the aggre- 

 gate was a large list of varieties. Like many another boy of my 

 day, while still in my teens, I knew fifty or more varieties of apples, 

 twenty-five or thirty of pears, ten or fifteen of peaches, grapes, and 

 plums, six or eight of cherries and a goodly list of bush fruits 

 and strawberries. This knowledge was fostered, supplemented and 

 extended by studying varieties at the county fair where many of 

 the boys, as well as their fathers, made exhibits. 



While a reasonable proportion of the boys in those days went 

 direct from school into some branch of farming and planted orchards 

 more or less like the ones I have described, and while a few took up 



