Your letter of the 2d duly received, and will endeavor to give you the information you desire. I have been successfully running the fruit house on the banks of the Delaware river above Bristol for many years, and I have put up quite a number of buildings on a similar plan in other States, and in my opinion ice is far better for keeping fruits than a chemical process. To illustrate my statement I would inform you of a house in Baltimore conducted by the chemical process, and a party from Washington had 4,000 barrels of apples placed there on storage, and their apples not coming out satisfactorily, they wrote to me to ship them twenty-five barrels last April just as they came from the tiers, and notwithstanding the exposure of fruit in shipping to Washington, they claimed that our apples were twenty-five cents better as regards scald and twenty-five cents as regards rot, making the stock fifty cents preferable, and their apples and our stock came from the same section of the country. Then again, I heard of another party putting a lot of apples in one of the chemical buildings. They came out in bad condition. Some time ago (March, '86) I brought down to the store a few apples that were put away in my building in the fall of 1884, and they looked very well, especially in regard to style.

I take pleasure in sending you a lithograph of my country-seat where one of my fruit houses can be seen. I also send one to Hon. Marshall Wilder, Dorchester, Mass. Philadelphia, Pa., April 8th, 1886.

[Col. Wilder had some idea of preparing a paper for the Massachusetts Horticultural Society, and to aid him we wrote to Mr. Hellings, to which the above is a response. Col. Wilder did not have the occasion, so we take the liberty of giving the letter here. We may remark that Mr. Hellings is one of the pioneers in the cold storage method of preserving fruits, a subject which he has pursued in the most intelligent manner from the earliest inception of the idea to the present time. His experience is therefore of special value to us all. - Ed. G. M].