Tree-agents have a great respect for Mrs. Tarryer. When a good-looking youngster comes along, who appears as though he was a beginner, I have known her to invite him into the sitting-room and treat him with as much distinction and kindness as if she had six or seven marriageable daughters. He never gets a chance to draw his pictures on her. It is her books, correspondence and pictures he is kept busy with till dinner-time, so that he forgets all about his trade. After dinner she'll have him out in the garden, in the season of it, and show him her own nursery and fruit and floral treasures, and if the youngster evinces any particular sensibility to treatment - interest in the real-life sciences, etc., she sometimes gives him a small sum of money, if she finds he needs it, to buy the books she recommends to him.

One such young man she rather fell in love with and induced to stay over night with us. When she had taken leave of him at the foot of the lane next morning, she came back glowing like a middle-aged angel, saying, "I do really think, Alonzo, that lad will go into some better business. He says he shall. His father and mother need him at home and he says he's going back there to plant a garden. He's engaged to a lovely young girl and she wants him. Isn't it dreadful to imagine a young fellow like that, lending himself to the scattering of weed-pests, peach-yellows, and all the insects and fungous plagues one can think of - diseases for aught we know - along with good-for-nothing fruit-trees, which people only buy out of pity or to get rid of him !"

She remembers when her father paid $4 for two accursed cling-stone peach-trees, which blasted all the orchards in the neighborhood with the yellows, while her mother was selling or giving away the most beautiful seedling trees, true to name, for twenty-five cents a dozen - she furnishing a spade for the digging. These varieties had been proven, locally, by the strictest pomological judges the world ever saw.

Except, perhaps, for drumming the parents of thieving children into fruit-planting, and making the taste for some fruit common in crude markets, among people that never had any before, Mrs. Tarryer insists that nurserymen to date have been a detriment to the country. "Had people been let alone they would surely have served themselves far better".

While I am writing she hands me a London Garden for August 10th of the current year, with a page on the "Evils of Grafting." The editor seems up to his neck in a controversy that must have been going on for a long time. He's sharp for the right, and has learned that grafted rhododendrons are growled at in this country. Seeds of European common-sense sown by valiant Eugene Baumann the elder, and others, have taken root here. He maintained, stoutly, that only seeds of our own R. Catawhiense should be used. The London editor knows, and has named, in a previous number, some English nurseryman who propo-gate rhododendrons by layers, and grows many other things upon their own roots, that have been habitually and needlessly crippled by grafting or budding. "When we planted an orchard some years ago" - (says the English editor, and God bless him!) - "we could not get a Ribston Pippin on its own roots anywhere, and everyone we spoke to about it was ready to laugh at the wish as ridiculous." Now, it would appear, the English public is served by better naturalists, though sophisticated trade is still moved much thereby.

Mrs. Tarryer is always solid with her authorities. She refers me to a scrap in Vol. Ill, p. 437 of Downing's Horticulturist, showing that engrafting at best, is but a temporary gardener's expedient - not fit for the base of wholesome business. In 1843, or afterwards, Signor Calderini, of Milan, budded Panicum crus-galli (farm grass) with rice. He saved seed from the onion and sowed it, and thought he got a larger kernel and more vigorous growth from the progeny among the fungi of Lombard marshes. The experiment helps prove that even engrafted things may bear seed of their kinds.

The way she treats case-hardened and roguish tree-agents makes me almost pity them. They never get inside of the house. She meets them at the door with a broom, and if a cool manner does not send them off the premises, she warms it for them. One flagrant case must be related. If the nursery trade only knew what is said of it, how its ears would burn !

Parson Camperdown, long since retired from pulpit business, used to be our beloved minister, and many a theological confab Mrs. Tarryer has had with him. She never could abide his use of "grafting," in illustrating the change of heart a Christian experiences in turning from wrong to right courses. She deemed the crafty simile unworthy of the serious subject. But the parson persisted, and when he quit preaching and came back to his farm, he grafted everything he had, almost - raised hob with his mossy old orchard - (long since dead and uprooted), and they say Mrs. Tarryer asked him if he didn't mean to "graft" a new switch in place of the rather bald and mulish tail his Dobbin carried. He was continually bringing over samples of his " improved" fruit, which Mrs. Tarryer never could see any special merit in, and finally the old gentleman (partly to please the lady, no doubt), set up for an amateur strawberry-grower, "without a particle of taste, or the least eye for color or form,'* as Mrs. Tarryer remarked at the time.

Not long after she had turned from the door a particularly smooth villain of a tree-agent (whom she declared she had seen at some Peter Funk auction near the steamboat dock), the parson presented himself at our door smiling all over, saying 500 plants of "Dr. Nicaise" strawberries he had ordered had come that day, and would Mrs. Tarryet accept a hundred of them ?

This was too much. "O Mr. Camperdown !" - she cried - "You are a bigger fool in pomology than you ever were in theology ! You have paid twenty-five dollars of good money to that rascally tree-agent who was here the other day ! I wouldn't have trusted his face for a minute - a born thief if ever there was one! All the strawberry plants he sold around here he dug from Widow Aleshine's old bed of Prolifics! Why didn't you ask me about 'Dr. Nicaise' It won't grow. It died out of my garden more than two years ago. I don't believe there are 500 plants in the world !"

By this time she had Mr. Camperdown inside in an arm-chair and was telling him she must make an example of him for that piece of business. And she did. The old gentleman's money never baited any more tree-rogues in our neighborhood. But she maintained more positively than ever that mistakes in theology were not as harmless as some people think, because they ail seem to crop out in all the details of common life.

The decrepit young orchards scattered about the country embitter Mrs. Tarryer against the ravages of wholesale nurserymen. "Those dying trees wouldn't be there breeding vermin, if people with more money than sense hadn't been tempted and badgered into buying short-lived trees they didn't want or know how to care for. And the worst of it is that every bit of good native fruit we have is whisked off by resident simpletons to go the road of the Baldwin and Greening. By these means local pride and ambition is destroyed - made impossible without a rebellion - instead of being nourished at home, everywhere, as it should be. The very people on whose farms and in whose gardens new seedling fruits of great public value originate, - having no taste or standards of their own - never know what they have got till trees come back to them with the mark of the grafting 'beast' upon them".

These sayings of Mrs. Tarryer's will mislead concerning a very mild and sweet tempered woman, unless it is understood that they are condensed from an ordinary life-time. She feels that the culture and propagation of the apple by right methods is a matter of the very first national importance, intimately connected with the welfare and character of our people.

"Now," said she, when five tall sons and a daughter - besides a table-full of relatives and friends had sampled that delicious wild-apple sauce - "do you take your tools and go to that tree and dig carefully at the shrubby base of it, and I think you can divide off two or three small bushes, which, nicely trimmed and heeled-in over winter will do to set in the nursery next spring, and will make fine trees, to the manor bom. That is a valuable apple. Three barrels at the first bearing is a large product, and in a season when apples are very wormy these were not touched by insects at all. The Baldwin itself was once precisely such a comeby-chance tree. By turning up roots for adventitious buds, or by cuttings, suckers, layers or seeds, were the radical old ways of the garden for propagating fruits, and if this doctrine, commonly accepted, can be made to give the grafting nursery-trade a wholesome check - so much the better. Fruit-growers must have roots that they know, as well as soils and manures that they know.

Go, boys, and I'll go with you".