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few weeks ago in the College Gymnasium in Durham, 140 young men and women passed over the platform before their admiring parents and friends and received their diplomas from President Hetzel. Among these graduates was one whose college course. was made possible through an unusual endowment by his parents. The college training of this young man is dedicated to the development of New Hampshire's resources and the story is so interesting that I think it is worth telling.

The story of how this man came to college traces back to a hill farm in West Hopkinton, settled more than 150 years ago, and one of the first farms in that section of New Hampshire to enter the commercial fruit industry. There

the original owner planted trees principally of the Russet variety. These apples stored through most of the long winter in the farm cellar were drawn by ox team to Concord to be sold or shipped to Lowell and Lawrence. One old tree still stands on the farm, a relic of this early venture in the apple business.

When the grandfather of our college lad purchased this farm some fifty odd years ago, the chief business was beef production. Nevertheless, he was aware of the profits in apples and, like many another New England farmer, he thriftily grafted with Baldwin cions every seedling tree which sprang up in the corners of the stone walls and other odd places about the farm. He went

farther than this and farther than most of his neighbors, in that he made a practice of fertilizing some piece of ground heavily to make it into a productive garden and then planting fruit trees in the garden. As the trees grew and required all the space, the process was repeated on another piece of ground. Thus when the farm passed into the hands of his son, and his son in turn looked down upon a one-year-old baby boy, there were possibly two hundred trees on the farm in fence corners and in little lots where the gardens had been. It was with the resolve that this newest son might go to college if he chose that Levi French set one hundred and fifty apple trees on a piece of what might be called worn out pasture land. were of the Baldwin variety. with his father Levi French had engaged in the business of buying fruit, often purchasing a neighbor's crop on the tree, picking and packing it and sending it to market, the best fruit and the greatest profits had always come from orchards in which the Baldwin predominated. Hence when he came to make a planting for his boy, the trees were all of this variety upon which he could count for high class fruit.

They When

It may be said with literal accuracy that the boy and the trees grew up together and that each helped the other to develop. There were times when the sod around the trunks had to be dug away with a large old-fashioned grub hoe, and "Al" remembers still how heavy that tool could get at the end of a day. He remembers, too, how sacks were placed around some of the trees which were backward in order to hold moisture and keep down the grass around the trunks, and how as he cultivated those trees the teeth of the cultivator sometimes stuck in the burlap with disastrous results.

The orchard was started in the days when there were relatively few orchard pests, and spraying was practically an unknown art. But before the project had gone very far, it was threatened by

an attack of plant lice. A journey was made to a distant neighbor from whom a formula could be obtained for the oldfashioned kerosene emulsion. Before the days of commercial tobacco extracts, this material was the standard control for sucking insects. Carefully mixed according to the formula and applied with a cattle sprayer, it did the work and the trees were freed of their pests. The business of spraying could not long be conducted upon this scale, however, and it was not long before father and son found themselves in attendance at a demonstration at the village of Hopkinton where one of the professors from the college at Durham was teaching the use of spraying machinery. At first the demonstration did not bid fair to be a success. The man on the pump handle struggled violently while the college man holding the nozzle constantly exhorted him to give "more pressure." The long whiskered pessimist on the edge of the crowd grumbled that this was what you would expect from a college "perfesser" but on investigation it was found that a part of the pump had been lost in shipment. After a hurried visit to the nearest plumber, a new valve was improvised and soon the mist like spray was covering the trees in the proper way. The apple worm, or codling moth, was then the most important pest, and the sprays applied consisted principally of poisons such as lead arsenate. The demonstration proved successful; for a considerable amount of spraying with this material was done in the vicinity that year. The following season Mr. French and one of his neighbors purchased a similar barrel pump, which was used to keep the apples in the new orchard clean until replaced by a power sprayer.

While the orchard and "Al" French grew together, progress on the college career was going forward at the same time. Some of my friends tell me of meeting a small boy with a dinner pail almost as large as himself, trudging down from the hills to school. In due season he passed to the Hopkinton High

School at Contoocook, journeying there by train, getting home on some winter nights when the snow was deep, as late as midnight, but always keeping the goal of college in sight.

In 1917, on the occasion of a football game between New Hampshire State and the boys from the Massachusetts Agricultural College, "Al" came down with a number of his schoolmates and caught his first glimpse of the institution. In 1919 he came to stay.

The orchard too was ready to do its share. The fruit which had previously sold to local buyers was now marketed to better advantage, sometimes on the foreign markets and sometimes on the late winter market of Boston after cold storage for a considerable period. It was good fruit, as the returns from the commission firms of Liverpool and Boston attest. The checks which came back were sufficient to accomplish the object for which the trees were set. Funds from other sources were necessary, it is true, for instance the proceeds from college news items written up for the newspapers of the state, but in the

main it has been the orchard that has borne the burden.

In college his record is one which few students will surpass. Alfred French was elected to the agricultural honorary fraternity for scholastic merit at the first election after he had been long enough in college to meet the standards of the organization. When the fraternity of Phi Kappa Phi was organized to admit from the entire institution a dozen or fourteen of the most talented students, Alfred French's name again was in the first list of initiates from his class.

Now the college course is over and the work for which it has been a preparation has commenced. To a man with a record of this sort more than one opportunity is sure to present itself. A few weeks ago there came to my desk a request from a great university of the far west calling for talented students to take up positions as assistants while continuing their college training with a view to entering the professional field in agriculture. There were not many whom I could recommend for work of this type but "Al" French was one and I called