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dirt off of the peaches and apricots after the fruit is dried, and also takes the 

 fuzz off of the peach. It is simply a drum made of wire, some three feet 

 in diameter and maybe four feet long, that will hold perhaps a hundred 

 or a hundred and fifty pounds of dried fruit. We put the fruit into that 

 and revolve it round and round, and it will astonish you the amount of 

 fuzz and dust and other stuff that will wear off of that fruit and drop oat 

 underneath; have that drum on a little frame, so that it will be off the 

 ground, and turn it like a grindstone, and it will also astonish you to see 

 how much it adds to the looks of the fruit. One of my neighbors, who 

 dried nearly a hundred tons of fruit this year, had one of those machines, 

 and he run through it most of his dried peaches. I think he had forty -five 

 tons of dried peaches, and he run nearly all those through one of those 

 machines, and he told me that he got over six bushels of fuzz and dust 

 and stuff off his fruit that fell through that wire on to the ground under- 

 neath. In all the processes of handling, packing, boxing, and sacking of 

 your fruit, if you sack it, be as neat as possible about it, because at the time 

 of year we are drying our fruit there is more or less dust flying everywhere; 

 even when you get as far back from any public road as you can, the dust 

 will rise and settle on your fruit, and if the fruit is freshly cut every par- 

 ticle of dust that settles on it sticks there, and when you run this through 

 the revolving wire it adds very greatly to the looks and value of it. In 

 drying prunes we allow the fruit to get thoroughly ripe on the trees; so 

 ripe that it will begin to dry up of itself; so far as that is concerned it is all 

 the better if it shows signs of shriveling up or drying on the tree; pick it 

 from the trees carefully; a good many men shake the prunes from the tree; 

 I do not like to see that; they drop on to the ground, and some put a sheet 

 under the tree and shake them on that; you shake off a great many leaves 

 and twigs and trash from the tree with it, and it is a very difficult matter to 

 separate them ; the best way is to pick prunes from the trees by hand ; take 

 them to your packing shed and dip them in boiling water; some use lye, 

 but that is unnecessary, for boiling water will crack the skin about as well 

 as lye and will hasten the drying process, and that is the only reason I 

 know of for dipping them into hot water, for the prune dries very slowly 

 without they are dipped; they are put on trays similar to peaches and apri- 

 cots, and allowed to stay there until they get dry, and they are taken up 

 and boxed or sacked, as the case may be; most people send their prunes to 

 market in white muslin sacks, though some have boxes about the same as 

 they do for apricots and peaches. 



Mr. Aiken: How long do you dry the prunes? 



Mr. Smith: We dry them until the moisture is out of them — until they 

 are dried through. You can tell that by taking up a few specimens and 

 breaking them open, and whenever they are dried through to the pits they 

 are dried sufficient to keep. 



Mr. Gray: Do you dip your prunes after they are dried ? 



Mr. Smith: Yes, sir; after they are dried and we get ready to box them 

 we dip them in boiling water or boiling lye, and that softens them up again 

 and puts them in good order for packing or boxing. Now, I want to go 

 back a little and speak about insects: In dipping the dried fruit in the 

 boiling water to kill the eggs of the insect that make the worm in dried 

 fruit, those eggs are deposited in the dried fruit while the fruit is on the 

 yard drying; there is a little miller something like the codlin moth that 

 lays the egg in the fruit while it is on the yard drying, and if you go in 

 the drying yard late in the evening, of a warm summer evening, you 

 will see a great many of those insects flitting about over the trays, and 

 you will have to be very careful or you will not see them, because they 



