[Make a notch in the end of one twig, sharpen (flat) the end of the other twig, insert it in the notch, and fasten the two together with twine.]
Once there was a man who had a great, vacant field, full of rich earth. What should he do with it? I’ll tell you what he did with it. He got a lot of young apple-trees, and set them out. He set them out very carelessly. He did not stop to find out what kind of apples they were. He did not stop to set the trees in nice rows. He stuck them in wherever it happened, some so close together that they greatly interfered with each other; some too far apart.
Now after a few years these apple-trees, some of them, began to bear apples, and what do you think they were? Crab-apples, every one of them. Crab-apples! Sour and small at that.
The man didn’t know what to do. He had wasted lots of time and money on that orchard. He was just as some of us will be if we are careless when we are young, and do not look or care to see what we are setting out to grow in our lives, or take any pains with our planting, to have it right. What should the man do? Well, I’ll tell you what he did do.
He went around to every tree in his orchard, and took the branches one at a time. He sawed off the branches, crab-apples, leaves, and all. Then he made a cleft in the stump of each branch that was left, and bound in that cleft a branch from a tree that bore sweet apples. These branches were given him by a great gardener, who keeps a wonderful orchard of sweet trees for that very purpose.
This work is called grafting. I have two twigs here, and I will show you how it is done. The largest twig, that I will stick in this flower pot, we’ll call the crab-apple-tree, and here is a twig from a sweet apple-tree that I will graft in.
And then the whole orchard was changed because the sweet apple branches grew on to the old stumps, and the sap rose up from the ground into them, and they bore fruit, lots of it, and very sweet. But think of all the years that were wasted. And think of all the trouble the man had been put to, sawing off the branches one by one, and grafting in new branches to take their places. And all of that he might have spared himself by setting out the right kind of trees, in the right places, when the orchard was young.