Exeter for us. Three teams were sent at once, and each team brought
home two boxes. Three trips were made, and the entire prospective
orchard was safely landed. Monday saw our whole force at work planting
trees. Small stakes had been driven to give the exact centre for each
hole, so that the trees, viewed from any direction, would be in straight
lines. Sam, Zeb, and Judson were to dig the holes, putting the surface
dirt to the right, and the poor earth to the left; I was to prune the
roots and keep tab on the labels; Johnson and Anderson were to set the
trees,--Anderson using a shovel and Johnson his hands, feet, and eyes;
while Thompson was to puddle and distribute the trees. The puddling was
easily done. We sawed an oil barrel in halves, placed these halves on a
stone boat, filled them two-thirds full of water, and added a lot of
fine clay. Into this thin mud the roots of each tree were dipped before
planting.

My duty was to shorten the roots that were too long, and to cut away the
bruised and broken ones. The top pruning was to be done after the trees
were all set and banked. The stock was fine in every respect,--fully up
to promise. Watching Johnson set his first tree convinced me that he
knew more about planting than I did. He lined and levelled it; he pawed
surface dirt into the hole, and churned the roots up and down; more
dirt, and he tamped it; still more dirt, and he tramped it; yet more
dirt, and he stamped it until the tree stood like a post; then loose
dirt, and he left it. I was sure Johnson knew his business too well to
need advice from a tenderfoot, so I went back to my root pruning.

We were ten days planting these thirty-four hundred trees, but we did it
well, and the days were short. We finished on the 7th of November. The
trees were now to be top pruned. I told Johnson to cut every tree in the
big orchard back to a three-foot stub, unless there was very good reason
for leaving a few inches (never more than six), and I turned my back on
him and walked away as I said these cruel words. It seemed a shame to
cut these bushy, long-legged, handsome fellows back to dwarfish
insignificance and brutish ugliness, but it had to be done. I wanted
stocky, thrifty, low-headed business trees, and there was no other way
to get them. The trees in the lower, or ten-acre, orchard, were not
treated so severely. Their long legs were left, and their bushy tops
were only moderately curtailed. We would try both high and lo