I am going
to say we have sixty-five dollars charged up to it, and it will take
$185 more. Now, there is $250, if I haven't made any mistake. I planted
among those trees nursery stock, and I sold off, during the time that
those trees were growing, nursery stock to the value of, we will say,
$250, making my inter-crops pay the expense of cultivation and interest
on the investment up to that time. So don't forget that. Now, this is a
case where we are going to balance our books, as every business man
does, and every farmer ought to. I have, up to the time those trees were
eight years of age, invested approximately $250, and have received back
not only that, but the interest on the investment. So, at eight years of
age the orchard cost me nothing. Now, that would be the way a great many
people would figure that proposition. I can't do it that way. I am going
to charge that orchard with $250 an acre for supervision. Now, above
that line (indicating on black-board) it looks as though that orchard
had been built up for nothing, and below the line you see a debit of
$250 charged against that orchard. There is not one man in a hundred
that contemplates a proposition of this kind that is willing to charge
his orchard up with the gray matter that he puts into it. But there was
an inter-crop in that orchard, of health and satisfaction, which is
worth more to me than my services, so I will put that in here as $250.
(Laughter and applause.) Now, I walked across this morning--I like to
walk, and I came across the park. I saw a monument right over here in a
little iron circular enclosure, erected in honor of Andrew Jackson
Donald, a man who died several years ago, the man who was partly
responsible for the magnificent landscape gardening effect of which this
building is a part. It said on the monument this: "His life was devoted
to the improvement of the national taste in rural art." Down below it
said: "His mind was singularly just, penetrating and original." Any man
ought to be proud to have that sort of thing engraved upon his monument,
and, gentlemen, any man who will go out and plant nut trees like those
you saw this afternoon, ought to have a monument under those trees
expressing sentiments similar to these, because he has done something
which remains after him, and it is one of the most worth-while things
that any human being can do. That is one of the other valuable things
about a nut orchard.
Now, this nut orchard--this is
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