"A stitch in time" is an old saying; and a careful examination around trees, from time to time, at this season of the year, will often prevent depredations of mice and injury to the trees.

After so much experience, what is, in your opinion, the best remedy or preventive of mice from gnawing young orchard trees.

I have a large quantity that are, or will be, somewhat exposed, and I want to take early measures to prevent injury. If coal tar is recommended, how am I to judge that it is not too strong so as to injure the trees! In haste, respectfully, T. G. Yeomahs. Walworth, N. F., Oct. 2, 1861.

We believe the best preventive to be the following. Just before winter, throw up a small hill about a foot high round each tree - removing it in the spring. The mice look for the tender bark at the surface of the ground, and not being able to find it, let the tree alone.

Coal tar is found dangerous - sometimes serving the purpose well - but, when too strong, killing the tree. ED.

Examine carefully your trees around which you have spread a mulch; so, also, your orchard left in grass. As we write, a friend has just come to say his young and thrifty dwarf trees, an hundred or more, are nearly all girdled by mice, because his man, when mulching in the fall, carelessly put the litter close to their bodies. If snow lies deep on the * earth, it is always safe, and, in the light of preventive, profitable, to expend time in tramping hard, close around the bodies of all fruit trees. By so doing the injurious work of may a mouse may be checked.

It is a too common practice with farmers, and some professed fruit-growers, to prune apple, pear, cherry, and other trees in midwinter. We do not regard the season as the correct or best one for the labor; and why, because if the operation is correctly performed, the cut made close to the bud or body, it is liable to dry hard, crack, and cause death or an enfeebled condition of the bud in the one case, or decay of the trunk or large limb in the other. Very rare is it that wounds made in winter heal over readily. If the work is not carefully performed at the first operation, that is, if to save the bud from drying, we cut an inch beyond it, then the whole has again to be gone over in spring or summer; or otherwise, on the end of each branch so pruned, we have a piece of wood to die and decay.