es. The school was planned and built by Mrs. Theodate Pope
Riddle, and I was told there that it cost seven million dollars. It is a
beautiful and original group of buildings in the lovely Farmington River
Valley, well worth visiting.

Mr. Sperry the science teacher, is deeply interested in the nut trees.
Dr. Arthur Harmount Graves and I have both given him a number of
chestnut trees, and I have added a variety of others, walnuts,
persimmons, papaws, pecans, filberts and others as well as the topworked
seedling hickories. The trees have been given reasonably good and
intelligent care. Many trees were badly winter killed or injured last
winter when the temperature dropped to twenty-four below zero in
Hartford, official, and is said to have reached forty below in
Litchfield county. Japanese chestnuts were especially badly injured. But
hybrids having an American strain seemed generally to be little injured.
Filberts also showed bad injury. Pecans, persimmons and a papaw seemed
to have weathered the winter, though they should be further observed
before deciding. The nut trees have been set out in orchard form over
tracts of a number of acres and well fertilized. The land is good.

Incidentally Mr. Sperry expressed the thanks of the school with more
than one bottle--of fine maple syrup which he and the boys make every
spring.

The mollissima chestnut tree in my yard at Litchfield, which Dr. Graves
considers remarkable because it bears a moderate crop of fertile nuts
every year without apparent benefit of outside pollination, was stripped
almost bare of branches by an ice storm. It had reached thirty five feet
in height, mainly, perhaps because pretty well surrounded by taller
trees. Now it has to start over again from a much lower height. It bore
a few nuts on the remaining branches this year.

On account of the restrictions on driving I did not visit Mr. Beeman at
New Preston, but he wrote me that he had a few quarts of hickory nuts,
chiefly Glover from one of his large topworked trees. He has a couple of
acres set out to grafted hickories, some of which have been bearing for
several years. Pretty good for a man now 86 who began nut growing less
than ten years ago and who has serious physical handicaps. He is the
man, as many of you do not know, who, when he began with nut trees,
built scaffolds 40 feet high about each of two hickory trees in his
yard, and topworked them almost to the last branch by a method of his
own O