PROCEEDINGS OF TWENTY-SIXTH FRUIT-GROWERs' CONVENTION. 89 



this rising generation's fathers were interested. Why is it that more 

 gentlemen don't do this? No one who lives in the country and is 

 making money there can help knowing that there is no education too high 

 or qualification too fine to be taken back there. It pays so much better 

 than any other business, if we go about it with the same interest and put 

 our money back into it. Why are men satisfied with such miserable, 

 contemptible lives when they are in a crowded city, when they can have 

 cleanliness, breath, and dignity just outside of the smoke and fumes of 

 the city? I am a city woman myself, but I would not choose the city 

 again. It is a place you can always come back to when you desire it. 

 These landowners should go back to the country and manage their prop- 

 erty themselves. Another thing you city farmers should do is to take 

 a human interest in the tenants you have on the farms. It can not be 

 that all the New England farmers are dead or that they are multi- 

 millionaires, yet why is it that they don't come and run the country 

 lands as they used to? I have had a hard time in getting help, and 

 more of late years I have favored the Irish Protestants, because they 

 are fine farmers and fine dairymen, and on a whole, good workers. I 

 have got a great many men from the County of Lemar, and find that 

 they have very thoroughly learned what they know. The time of the 

 embryonic state has passed and the time for growth has come, and I 

 believe that if more of the city people would go to the country we 

 would meet on a common ground and both be better off. 



MAKING THE MOST OF OUE FEUITS. 



By MRS. W. N. SHERMAN", of Fresno. 



The papers of to-day have covered a wide field, carrying us back to 

 the women who have won victories in the past. Those treating of the 

 present have told us how to make the ranch pleasant. It seems to be 

 left to me to look into the future. We women can do a great deal to 

 make the ranch profitable by adding to the beauty and finish of the goods 

 prepared for the market. The men are skillful in tilling the soil and in 

 pruning the vine and tree. A few — a very, very few — market the products 

 of the ranch in an artistic package. The most of the fruit-growers 

 merely dump the magnificent fruit into packing-boxes, jolt it into town 

 on springless wagons, often over dusty roads, to be handled by the com- 

 mission packers and thrown into packing boxes; and if it were not for 

 the railroad inspection, it would be loaded with equal indifference into 

 the cars for Eastern transportation. I used to think it was dishonesty 

 that made this careless packing, but as time has passed I am more and 

 more convinced that it is want of knowledge and the carelessness in 

 little details which are characteristic of this State. We all know that 



