550 
TO CLEAR WILLOWS OF WORMS. 
work of destruction. The chum and blue dye tub 
both stood full in the corner. Cream and blue dye 
painted the floor nicely. Then over went the flour 
and meal barrel, and with them a table, upon which 
all the dishes were piled. With this mixture, they 
satisfied their appetites, and then pulled two beds 
down into the mass. They then ripped open the 
beds, tore up the clothes, and made themselves a 
nest. This was not all ; for when the old gentle- 
man came home and opened the door, out rushed 
the old she devil between his legs, knocking him 
" heels over head" into the wood pile and crippling 
him for the balance of the winter, and so frighten- 
ing his wife that a miscarriage was the consequence, 
at the imminent danger of her life. Furthermore, 
the horse, being alarmed at the hoggish hubbub, 
started and run off, and not only broke the sleigh, 
but his own neck. A whole life time of "pork 
speculation" would not pay all this damage. Even 
now, while I write, three pigs, such as no fence 
can stop, have crept into the cellar and destroyed a 
dozen pounds of my gude wife's butter, just taken 
from the churn. 
" Speedy profits," ha 1 By my life, the United 
States have never yet seen those profits from swine. 
I look upon them as the great curse of the land. 
If it were not for these miserable brutes, what mil- 
lions of rails would be saved. "Nearly every 
one, therefore, has an interest in swine." True, 
and it is just such an interest I have in the cholera. 
The one is as great a pestilence as the other, (a) 
Cultivation of Grasses at the South. — Are grasses 
cultivated at the south ? My opinion is that there 
exists a kind of grass warfare throughout all cot- 
tondom. If more attention were paid to cultivating 
gTass in all the southern states, there is no doubt 
but it would be better for the whole country, than 
a sole dependence upon cotton. But how hard it 
is for a people to make so great a change as that 
would be to change from cotton, corn, and hogs, 
to that of grass-growing, sheep-raising, and cattle- 
gTazing. I should like to hear from some of your 
correspondents, at the south, the reason why grass 
is not cultivated there more than it is, and why the 
growing of wool would not be more profitable than 
the growing of cotton at prices which they are all 
the time grumbling at. 
Letters from California. — I am quite interested 
in the perusal of these letters. I hope they are 
from a pen that we can rely upon ; for amid the 
volumes of " stuff" now inpouring from that region, 
it is difficult to know what part to believe. I don't 
exactly like the description, however, that he gives 
of " live oaks" that " vie in height with pines that 
shoot up 300 feet !"(&) If that is not "shooting with 
a long bow," then I will acknowledge that about 
live oaks, there is a sad amount of ignorance on 
the part of your Reviewer. 
The above, from our indefatigable correspondent 
Reviewer, came too late for insertion in the regular 
course of our last number, and we regret to say 
that we shall not hear again from him till February 
or March, as he was compelled, by ill health, last 
August, to return to his old element, and make a 
long sea voyage. Our last letters from him state 
that he had already much improved, and that he i 
hoped to be at home early in January. Just before 
he sailed, we made him a visit, a brief notice oi 
which we have written out for the first number oi 
our next volume. Reviewer then will be unmasked, 
and our many curious readers will at last know 
who he really is. 
(a) Our friend seems to bristle up so fiercely on 
the subject of swine, that we hardly dare approach 
him in his hedgehog mood. The quills of "the 
fretful porcupine 1 '' are " airy nothings," gossamer, 
eider down, in comparison with that from the grey 
goose he was just now wielding. Our sage Re- 
viewer won't let the gentleman pig take his chance 
in the pea and clover fields, the apple orchards, nor 
the magnificent ranges of our western maize, but 
treats him altogether in two sry-lish a manner for 
our statistics. He introduces him into the cellar, 
the lard-ei; the kitchen, the nursery, bedroom, .and 
parlor; and finally installs him in the treble capa- 
city of pony for his master, midwife for his mis- 
tress, and driver for their team. Even facts are 
hard things to reason against, but poetry is still 
more obdurate, and we must therefore forego an 
answer to what is really unanswerable. We ap- 
prehend our friend had not enjoyed a good rasher 
of bacon in his musty garret for many a day of lent. 
A sausage, or spare rib, or even a dish of souse, or a 
bit of head cheese with his dry biscuit, would in- 
continently mollify his rind till it was as supple as 
if it had been lathered with lard oil. A tour to 
Edinburgh, where they carry up their pig nurse- 
lings to the seventh story, and feed with the other 
children, till they reach fifteen or twenty score, or 
to swate Ireland, where they are rated as household 
furniture, would soon place this once be-deviled 
race, on a fair footing with our ancient friend. 
(b) Reviewer further misunderstands our Cali- 
fornian. He says, " the evergreen, or live oaks., 
seem to vie in breadth with the height of the more 
northerly pines," by which we understand him as 
saying, that the former are as magnificently broad 
in their tops as the latter are aspiring. 
Trenching.. — I wish some of our friends^who 
are in the habit of seeing a mountain in every mole 
hill, could have seen a job of trenching, just done 
by Mr. Charles Downing, of Newburgh, at a cost 
of about $50 an acre. Although only dug about 
15 inches deep, the labor was very great in conse- 
quence of the immense quantity of stone below the 
surface ; and yet, this land has been in cultivation 
many years, but like most of the land under the 
plow, in the United States, it has only been scratch- 
ed over, without getting a mellow soil deep enough 
for any kind of roots to obtain a proper support. 
To Clear Willows of Worms. — A gentleman, 
in Stockholm, New Jersey, we are informed, has a 
fine weeping willow, which, for several years past, 
has been infested with a great number of worms. 
His wife, an intelligent lady, anxious to get rid of 
these pests, sprinkled a weak solution of tobacco 
over the branches from an upper window of the 
house ; and, much to her gratification, in a short 
time, the ground was strewed with dead worms, 
and the tree cleared of them without injury to the 
leaves. 
