Then, his interests and sympathies were enormously wide. He took in so
much! One day Edward was walking past Fulton Market, in New York City,
with Mr. Beecher.
"Never skirt a market," the latter said; "always go through it. It's the
next best thing, in the winter, to going South."
Of course all the marketmen knew him, and they knew, too, his love for
green things.
"What do you think of these apples, Mr. Beecher?" one marketman would
stop to ask.
Mr. Beecher would answer heartily: "Fine! Don't see how you grow them.
All that my trees bear is a crop of scale. Still, the blossoms are
beautiful in the spring, and I like an apple-leaf. Ever examine one?"
The marketman never had. "Well, now, do, the next time you come across
an apple-tree in the spring."
And thus he would spread abroad an interest in the beauties of nature
which were commonly passed over.
"Wonderful man, Beecher is," said a market dealer in green goods once.
"I had handled thousands of bunches of celery in my life and never
noticed how beautiful its top leaves were until he picked up a bunch
once and told me all about it. Now I haven't the heart to cut the leaves
off when a customer asks me."
His idea of his own vegetable-gardening at Boscobel, his Peekskill home,
was very amusing. One day Edward was having a hurried dinner,
preparatory to catching the New York train. Mr. Beecher sat beside the
boy, telling him of some things he wished done in Brooklyn.
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