18 
FLORIDA STATE HORTICULTURAL SOCIETY 
the Ladies’ Club of this city will be glad 
to welcome you, especially the ladies 
among you, where you will find an op¬ 
portunity to rest, an opportunity to write 
letters and chat, and we hope you will 
avail yourselves of it. 
I also wish to call attention to the fact 
that our reading room is open, and you 
will have an opportunity to sit there and 
read or attend to correspondence. 
More than this, I want to say that 
the business men of DeLand give you 
the heartiest kind of welcome; not mere¬ 
ly as a matter of words, but as I have 
known them the last two and a half 
years, in a matter of deeds and actions. 
Though I am a comparative stranger 
among them, I know you will go a long 
way before you will find a group of men 
more ready to give a hearty welcome 
than those of the city of DeLand. 
RESPONSE BY L. B. SKINNER 
I want to say that I myself have al¬ 
ready had the practical assurance of this 
hearty welcome of which Mr. Douglass 
speaks. I wanted to telephone very bad¬ 
ly a few minutes ago and rushed into a 
place and asked them if I could use their 
telephone. The man said, “Yes, every¬ 
thing we have is free this week.” (Laugh¬ 
ter.) 
Speaking of little cities: If you want to 
see a real little city, you ought to come 
to Dunedin. It is a gem. We have 
some things in common with you. We 
have oaks, the most beautiful oaks. I 
notice you pride yourselves upon your 
oaks, and you have reason to do so. The 
first thing I saw were your beautiful av¬ 
enues. In speaking of DeLand, my 
brother spoke of the avenues of oaks, 
so you see your fame has spread abroad. 
Dunedin is called the Little City of Oaks 
on the West Coast. 
We of the West Coast enjoy coming 
to the East Coast. Last year we jour¬ 
neyed to Miami; the year before we went 
to Orlando, to Jacksonville, to Gaines¬ 
ville, to Daytona; we have gone all over 
the State. I do not know where we will 
go next time. But one thing that strikes 
me, is the pleasure afforded by these lit¬ 
tle jouyneys over the State. I don’t 
know when I have enjoyed anything as 
much as Miami last year, and I know a 
great many others enjoyed it, too, be¬ 
cause more of you have come to DeLand 
than went to Miami. I know we would 
regret missing these meetings, not only 
for the meetings themselves, but meeting 
each other. We would not miss making 
the acquaintance of the business men of 
DeLand—in a free way. (Laughter.) I 
don’t know how they would be in a bus¬ 
iness proposition. The business men get 
a great deal out of the orange growers, 
there is no mistake about that. I have 
noticed down our way that we work like 
everything, and then turn what we have 
over to the business men. We do all we 
can to make them happy. (Laughter). 
This spirit of rivalry for the location 
