IN CHERRY AND BERRY TIME. 99 



out — strawberries and cherries — I m^-self accom- 

 panied Calaby to the float, to make sure that every- 

 thing should go off satisfactorily. And it did! We 

 signalled the steamer by waving a white flag until she 

 blew a toot of her siren in response. Then we stood 

 patiently waiting beside our boxes, a goodly dozen of 

 them in all. Up came the colossus towering high 

 above us. I turned my head to point to the end of a 

 big log that was half submerged in the water imme- 

 diately in the line of the steamer's bow. At that 

 instant the end of the heavy landing bridge was 

 dropped on to the middle of our float. There was 

 an ominous crack, and the next moment I was up to 

 my knees in water, and several of our fruit boxes were 

 floating half-submerged in the lake. The heavy 

 landing bridge had broken through the middle of our 

 float, leaving us without a platform to stand on. 



The eventual loss was not so great as might per- 

 haps have been expected. We unpacked our boxes, 

 spread the fruit out thin on newspapers on the veran- 

 dah to dry, and in the course of a few hours we were 

 able to repack it. I sold it frankly for what it was, 

 and made very nearly the full price of it all, except 

 one crate of cherries. 



The gathering of the strawberries, although re- 

 quiring a proportionately large number of fingers, is 

 not so onerous or so slow an operation as the picking 

 of cherries. I ought to have said that some growers 

 use for the latter purpose a small tin receptacle like a 

 pint mug, W'ith a pair of flexible scissor-like clippers 

 at the top ; but my pickers, after giving these 

 mechanical tools a trial, unanimously preferred the 

 old well-tried instruments of thumb and finger. 



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