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PLEASANT TALK
ABOUT
FRUITS, FLOWERS AND FARMING.
BY
HENRY WARD BEECHER.
NEW EDITION,
WITH ADDITIONAL MATTER FROM RECENT WRITINGS,
PUBLISHED AND UNPUBLISHED.
NEW YORK:
J. B. FORD AND COMPANY.
1874.
Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1873,
BY J. B. FORD AND COMPANY,
in the Office of the Librarian of Congress, at Washington.
University Press: Welch, Bigelow, & Co.,
Cambridge.
PREFATORY.
The Preface to the first edition of this volume, whichfollows these few words, will give some idea of the book’sorigin. Much of the material is of only passing importance,and is retained now rather from retrospective interest. Aconsiderable addition has been made, however, consistingof articles contributed to Mr. Bonner’s New York Ledger,bearing upon rural affairs, and also an unpublished addressupon The Apple. This was delivered at Iona Island, ona fair summer day, when ladies and gentlemen, severalscore,—editors, pomologists, singers, preachers, poets, andinventors,—gathered under Dr. C. W. Grant’s hospitabletrees,—for the house was too small to hold them,—to eatapples and pears, to discuss grapes solid and liquid, and tolisten to the venerable poet, Mr. Bryant, to Horace Greeley,to Charles Downing, and to notable songsters, whose warblesput the birds to envious silence,—at any rate, so thecompliments ran at the time.
The address had better luck at Iona than its great subjectdid in Paradise; though it will never give rise to such aliterature of results.
H. W. BEECHER.
Brooklyn, February, 1874.
PREFACE
TO THE FIRST EDITION.
No one of our readers will be half so curious to knowwhat this book contains as the author himself. For it ismore than twelve years since these pieces were begun, andit is more than ten years since we have looked at them.The publishers have taken the trouble to dig them out fromwhat we supposed to be their lasting burial-place, in the