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 surmounted by a many-pronged barbed wire, seem strangely like the wall which once shut the children of Adam out of the Garden of Eden.

Some thirty years ago, while pottering about among his fancy fruit-trees, Cap'n Steiner had made an experiment. On a bough of one of his vigorous young Strawberry Reds he had grafted the sprig of a Brandywine pear. Then he had carefully bound up the wound with grafting-wax and a piece of Miss Arabella's old flannel petticoat—Arabella, in those days, the older men held, was rarely comely and rosy-cheeked—and waited somewhat doubtfully for the outcome.

The strange marriage of aliens was an unlooked-for success. The Strawberry Red took kindly to the Brandywine pear, and before so many years had slipped away the good people of Chamboro beheld a wonder growing up in their very midst, a miraculous tree, one side of which bore abundant harvests of Strawberry Red apples, while the boughs of the other side were weighed down with a succulent wealth of Brandywine pears.

Nor was this all. Into the mellow and