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the; story of the; oak trff 
Alas, a few days later the ball was gone! Burbank 
hunted high and low until he found it on the ground 
over by the fence where some dog had rolled it; he put 
the seeds in the ground, and from them came the 
famous Burbank potato, which I am sure you have eaten 
for your dinner like hundreds of other boys and girls. 
Burbank worked so hard in his garden that one 
scorching July day he had a sunstroke. This made him 
very sick; he was twenty-one then, and said he to him¬ 
self, 
“I am going west to California where the air is mild 
and the breezes soft, and gardens grow more quickly 
than in Massachusetts.” So to California he went, but 
he did not find life easy. He took any odd job he could 
get; for a time he cleaned chicken coops on a chicken 
ranch, and he was paid so little he had to sleep at night 
in the chicken house. After awhile he found work in 
a factory, but he was still so poor he could only afford 
to sleep in a damp room over a steaming hot-house 
where his clothes were wet day and night. Of course 
he became very ill, so ill that he would have died had 
not a good woman—herself poor—saved his life by 
bringing him fresh milk every day from her cow. When 
he was well enough he worked again from job to job, 
but he had better luck now and was able to save a little 
money. With this money he bought a small plot of 
