and frozen so hard that they hammered on the solid, unresisting tires and spokes until, almost within sight of the farm, one wheel dismally collapsed.  As the wheel broke, the trailer slid off the road into a ditch, so that it was necessary to send on to the farm for the plow horses to haul out the car, the trailer and the trees.  The horses finished hauling the trees to that part of the farm where holes had been dug for them.  I had told my tenant to dig large holes and large holes he had certainly dug!  Most of them were big enough to bury one of the horses in.  Such was my amateurish first endeavor.

It was not until December of that year, 1919, that the twenty-eight trees were finally planted.  Although the ground was already somewhat frozen and the trees poorly planted as a result, most of them started to grow in the spring.  They would probably be living now if I had not been too ambitious to convert them from seedlings into grafted varieties such as the Ohio, Thomas and Stabler, which I had learned of during a winter’s study of available nut-culture lore.  I obtained scionwood from J. F. Jones, part of which I put on these abused trees and the remainder of which I grafted on butternut trees.  At that time, I must admit, I was much more interested in trying the actual work of grafting than I was in developing or even conceiving a methodical plan to be worked out over a period of years.

In order to facilitate my grafting work that spring, I pitched a tent in the woods and lived there for a week at a time, doing my own cooking and roughing it generally.  Cows were being pastured in this part of the woods and they were very interested in my activities.  If I were absent for a long time during the day, on my return I would find that noticeable damage had been done to my tent and food supplies by these curious cows.  While preparing some scionwood inside the tent one day, I heard a cow approaching and picked up a heavy hickory club which I had for protection at night, intending to rush out and give the animal a proper lesson in minding its own business.  The cow approached the tent from the side opposite the door and pushed solidly against the canvas with its nose and head.  This so aggravated me that I jumped over to that part of the tent and gave the cow a hard whack over the nose with my hickory stick.  It jumped away fast for such a big animal.  This seemed to end all curiosity on the part of these cows and I was allowed to carry on my work in peace.

With beginner’s luck, I succeeded with many of the butternut grafts, as well as with some of the grafts on the twenty-eight planted black walnuts.  However, all of the grafted black walnut trees ultimately died with the exception of one grafted Stabler.  This large tree was a monument of success for twenty years, bearing some nuts every year and maturing them, and in a good season, producing bushels of them.  One other of these seedlings survived but as it would not accept any grafts, I finally let it live as nature intended.