five for a quarter, the smallest change offered or accepted in pioneer days.
To-day you can not understand the sensation of this occasion, or how, later, the first boxes of Italian prunes on a country wagon collected a crowd of merchants, clerks, and street people to the marketing, and how voraciously they were eaten out of hand on the spot. The price, though extravagant, was not considered. You can not understand, for you were never young a thousand miles away from home, in a new country, isolated, without transportation, and without fruit. The peach-plums referred to were highly colored, large, and beautiful, as we know them in Oregon, but then they looked much larger and more beautiful, the aroma was most appetizing, and the melting, juicy pulp of the ripened fruit was enjoyed with a keen gustatory satisfaction.
In our distant home in the West, then as far out as Illinois, we only knew the little wild red plum, stung by the curculio, and wormy. We boys ate them at the risk of the worms, which we no doubt often ate with the plum. The cultivated domestic plum had not been introduced; we had never seen it, scarcely heard of it, hence the surprise.
Citizen P. W. Gillette was then a nurseryman, near Astoria, and had imported from his father's nursery in Ohio a fine stock of fruits and ornamentals. It was in 1855 I made my first considerable order, and I have been ordering and setting trees ever since, as I have been told I "had the tree-setting craze, and had it bad." In the sober reflections of the present I must acknowledge it was true. I had to set trees. For many years I cleared our heavy timber land, and set out ten acres a year. Moderately speaking, I have set over two hundred acres in trees—not a large orchard now. The time had not come for the large commercial orchards of to-day.
