ASSORTED FRUITS AND FLOWERS- 55 



ASSORTED FRUITS AND FLOWERS. 



Your Committee claim great credit for the brilliant 

 suggestion that the subject of their report naturally 

 divides itself into two heads. First, Assorted Fruits. 

 Second, Flowers; and to the consideration of these 

 respective divisions the Chairman devotes himself. 



Fortunately for your Committee we found but one 

 basket of fruit upon which to sit — in judgment ; and 

 here, in passing, pardon us the suggestion that surely the 

 ingenuity of man never devised a more complete apology 

 for fruit stealing than a dish of assorted fruit. Anybody 

 is equal to the steady contemplation of a basket of 

 apples or pears fer se, however ruddy or luscious. Nay^, 

 even a heaped dish of Early Crawfords or Black Ham- 

 burgs fails to dim the distinction between 7neum and teimi^ 

 unless the moral perceptions of the gazer are already 

 terribly blunted. Monotonous sameness, unrelieved by 

 contrast, soon palls the appetite, and the taste becomes 

 cloyed to satiety; but place upon a brown wicker 

 basket, first the solid and substantial portion of the 

 pomological community, apples of every shape and color 

 from the fair skinned Porter to the blushing Nonsuch, 

 completing the pyramid with a bewildering confusion of 

 pears, peaches and plums, wdth perhaps a golden brown 

 melon peering through each of two or three apertures 

 left for the purpose, and refreshing cascades of luscious 

 grapes gushing out of unsuspected crevices all over the 

 surface, and if it be artistically arranged with reference 

 to contrasts of color, shape and variety, you have a 

 monumental incentive to fruit stealing, which, spite of 

 "statutes in such cases made and provided/' will induce 



