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appear just about the time it is getting dark; they are there depositing the 

 egg in the fruit, and when the proper time comes and sufficient warmth is 

 in the box or in the sack, as the case may be, that egg hatches and the 

 worm goes to work eating up your fruit, and it will go through a certain 

 number of transformations and come out again after awhile — may be the 

 next year, if it is left alone — as a moth again. Dipping the fruit in boiling 

 water kills the egg and stops that; still, even if the egg is not there, it will 

 moisten your fruit and you can box it in good order. There is one little 

 item that a lady neighbor of mine discovered. I spoke about flattening 

 the fruit out with your fingers. This lady found out that running them 

 through a clothes wringer would flatten them out nicely; it is quite an 

 ingenious invention, and saves a good deal of time. The rule with apricots 

 holds good with the drying of peaches and plums and all stone fruits that 

 you have to dry, so far as I know, with very little variation. The only 

 thing I specially urge, is to have your fruit clean and neat in appearance, 

 and when you get to market fruit treated in that way will sell for a good 

 deal more, and more readily, than if you put it up in a slovenly manner. 



Mr. Hutchinson: I would like to ask you what degree of strength you 

 use in sulphuring? 



Mr. Smith: That will depend on the size of your sulphur box and the 

 amount of fruit you have in it. Our sulphur boxes hold forty trays, some 

 eighty. For a sulphur box that holds forty trays, I just take a little coal 

 shovel and put a few handfuls in it, touch a match to it, and put it under 

 the sulphur box and let it burn until it burns out, which will be in thirty 

 or forty minutes for that amount of sulphur, and I take it out and put it 

 on the yard. If you have a larger box that will hold eighty or a hundred 

 trays, you can use twice that amount of sulphur. If you have fruit only 

 in a certain space in the box it is not necessary to have so much sulphur; 

 you have to burn it so long; it ought to be subjected to the fumes of sul- 

 phur from forty minutes to an hour to make a good, bright fruit; an hour 

 is better than less than that. 



General Chipman: Some say twenty minutes, and I am a good deal in 

 the dark; I would like to know the reason of it. I was lead to believe that 

 an hour would destroy the fruit. 



Mr. Smith: It does not injure it a particle. If I were going to make a 

 very choice article of dried apricots or dried peaches, I would submit it to 

 the fumes of sulphur from forty minutes to an hour, anyway; there is no 

 danger in it; I can assure you of that, gentlemen; it is not deleterious to 

 the health of the consumers at all. 



Mr. Frank A. Kimball: Some of the fruit we have produced, that has 

 been sulphured, tastes very sensibly of the sulphur. We have produced 

 dried apples that tasted so very strongly that they were not palatable. 



Mr. Smith: I am glad the gentleman mentioned that. From the little 

 experience I had in drying apples — we dry no apples for sale in the Vaca- 

 ville district at all — however, I have dried a few for my own use to experi- 

 ment with, and found that the apple will taste of the sulphur. Apples 

 will taste of the sulphur, and also smell, while on other fruit it does not. 

 The pear may, too, but it does not injure the peach, or the apricot, or the 

 plum, there is no disadvantage to them at all that I have ever found. 

 I have sulphured from five minutes to an hour and a quarter to experiment 

 with and see if it was injurious to the fruit in any way; if it imparted any 

 unpleasant taste or smell to the fruit, and I have never been able to detect 

 any in those fruits; but the apple, it does taste and smell; why it is I do 

 not know unless the pores of the apple are more open than the peach and . 

 the apricot for the fumes of the sulphur to enter. If you put your peaches 



