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Show CHANGES IN THE ORCHARD. Tho following fragment of verse is takon from a poem once familiar to lovers of the bucolic, and is reproduced because it shows a condition now greatly changed: "Hod, and russet, ami yollow. Lying- hero in a hoap Pippins, rounded and mellow; Oroonings, ror winter lcoop; i Sook-no-furthers, whoso blushing: I Tho soul or a saint would try, j Till his rnco sliowod tito crimson, riuslilntr Tho chock or a Northern spy." There is only one distinotly apple region in tho world, and that is tho Hood River Valley, in Oregon. The lines above quoted bear tho same relation to Hood River that tho lonely shoemaker on tho bench boars to the Z. C. M. I. shoe factory up Main street. In the far-away days you might have soon apples in heaps under tho apple trees, but you can not see it now not whore tho applo business busi-ness is reduced to a science, .as every business must be to avoid a loss. Those times the orchardist cultivates tho soil about his trees until that soil is as mellow and responsive as tho old-time kitchen garden beds wore. Tho trees are sprayed in tho fall notice to quit, served on tho paraslto pests that j would othorwiso make their winter homos and breeding places in cozy corners of bark and J branch. They are sprayed again in tho spring, and two or three times in Hie early summer, an,d neither worm nor scale can establish resideflog. The orohardist goes through tho orohard 'as summer days develop the fruit, and thins where ' vigor has forced an undue number of apples into life, sending the ripening currents of the tree into the perfect fruit remaining. And in the time of apple harvest .the careful care-ful pickers go up on ladders and carefully pick II each apple, laying it tenderly in canvas pails, parrying it as carefully to the boxes, and send- . ing it with utmost concern to the packing House. 'j Only the culls, the refuse apples, ever are seen "red, russet and yellow, lyint lere in a heap." There may have been a day when apples could be shaken from, the trees, rounded into j piles on the ground and thumped into bins in i the cellar for winter use. But the day is past, j for there is money in apples; and the fruit now j accorded value have never a blemish on them, never a bruised spot, never a scale nor a speck I nor a flaw. They are perfect from core to skin. j And the color is as reliable in its promise as 1 the quality is sure in its fulfillment. |