Massachusetts Horticultural Society. 387 



All this, Mr. W. said, went to prove that it was something of a horti- 

 cultural exploit on the part of his ancestor, to raise a good store of pippins. 

 It was one, at any rate, with which some of the younger branches of the 

 Genealogical Tree had nothing to compare. He could point to no apples 

 of his own raising. He could not even exhibit that variety of apples — the 

 only sort which the Society had not abundantly furnished to our hand — 

 those " apples of gold set in pictures of silver,*' which the wise man of old 

 had given as the synonym of " a word in season ;" a synonym of which 

 he was always reminded when listening to the golden words and silver 

 tones of the distinguished friend, whom they had just welcomed home from 

 England. 



Mr. W. said there was a time when he might have claimed some fellow- 

 ship with the cultivators of the soil. He had once eaten the produce o 

 his own dairy ; but the experiment by no means proved that he knew which 

 side his bread was buttered, and he was glad to fall back on the excellent 

 supplies of his friend Hovey. 



He had never cultivated flowers, not even the flowers of rhetoric ; and 

 as to the sentimentalities of the subject, Mrs. Caudle had quite exhausted 

 them in a single sentence of one of her last lectures, where she told her 

 husband how "she vs^as born for a garden ! There's something about it 

 makes one feel so innocent! My heart always opens and shuts at roses." 



Yet though he might not employ either the language of sentiment or of 

 science, Mr. W. thanked heaven that he could feel as deep an admiration 

 for the exquisite productions of Horticulture, as if he were an adept in all 

 the processes and technicalities which belonged to it. It was one of the 

 great glories of such an exhibition, that it yielded delight to every eye, and 

 touched a chord in every heart. There was nothing exclusive about Na- 

 ture. She was no respecter of persons. The rose and the honeysuckle 

 smelt as sweet to the village beggar, as they did to Victoria ; and the most 

 scientific cultivator whose name adorned these walls, had no more relish for 

 his luscious clusters, than those of us who hardly knew a Sweetwater 

 from a Black Hamburgh. 



Nor did these exhibitions appeal only to the eye and to the senses. As 

 he was visiting the new and beautiful rooms of the Society this morning, 

 Mr. W. said he could not help recalling some associations of a time, — 

 more years ago than he might care to confess in that presence, — when he 

 was climbing the stairways over that spot upon another errand and in a dif- 

 ferent character, — " with satchel and shining morning face, creeping like a 

 snail unwillingly to school." Nor could he forbear regretting at first, that 

 the site should have been diverted from the exalted purpose to which it had 

 been so long devoted. But it needed only for him to enter the hall, and 

 give a moment's time for the moral of the scene to impress itself on his 

 mind, to lose all such regrets ; to feel that the Genius of the place had not 

 departed ; that education was still going on there ; education for the heart as 

 well as for the understanding ; a moral education, without which the mere 

 learning of the schools would be hardly better, than the knowledge which 

 our first parents derived from the forbidden tree. 



