No. 144.] 431 



Pass along the Clove Road — the Hunter Fly — the Cripplebush 

 Lane, or the Dutch Kills Turnpike, and although you may see 

 hundreds of tall thrifty trees, their owners will tell you, with a 

 quaint mystery, that they do not bear now. For a long period, 

 twenty 3 ears since, the towns of Brooklyn and Bushwick were 

 wont to send forth from these same trees wagon-loads of the finest 

 Vergaloo? with as little care as they now do potatoes, and at far 

 less cost. The writer has often been shown a handsome tree, by 

 Mr. James Debevoise, of Bushwick, from wiiich he had, more 

 than one seasoUj taken twenty bushels of the White Doyenne or 

 Vergaloo— but last summer, tired of its cumbering the ground, 

 he made the once generous old Burgher lay its thrifty branches 

 on the wood pile, and those arteries which once elaborated the 

 rich sap into the vinous fruit, now make the pot boil. 



Last summer we visited the famous orchard of Lawrence pears, 

 planted by the Messrs. Parsons, of Flushing, in 1848, and chro- 

 nicled by the enthusiastic Barry in his Fruit Garden. 



Eighteen hundred pear trees, seven years transplanted, of a 

 new and seductively described variety. The story had enchanted 

 our imagination more vividly than twenty years since did the 

 Arabian Nights. Conning it over for two or three years during 

 the season of frost and snow, we last summer determined an- 

 other season of fruits should not slip by without our beholding a 

 collection of golden pears our imagination pictured so vividly. 



Last summer, or rather fall — we repeat it — we went to Flush- 

 ing by the stage and returned by the steamboat, with the only 

 specimen of Lawrence pear in our coat pocket that Flushing 

 afforded that year — and that obtained from the garden of a kindly 

 Quaker, who pitied our disappointment. On the one thousand 

 eight hundred trees not a solitary pear and scarcely a leaf ap- 

 peared. 



Our horticultural zero was reached, and we hovered between 

 that and the freezing point for a calendar month; in fact, thought 

 of selling off the two or three thousand trees we had imported 

 from France at cost. Luckily our Yankee love of analysis was 

 excited to research, and we recollected that half a dozen trees, 



