"This is one of those vegetables," said Cobbett, "which all men most like." You know there is not a tolerable kitchen-garden in all Europe or North America, where peas are not cultivated, so it is worth while to ask a neighbor what are the best sorts, and how to cultivate them? For all peas are not alike - some are dry and insipid, while others are tender and sugary.

Well, there are a dozen or twenty sorts of peas, and you may find half the latter number in almost any large seed store. But many of them are only second rate, and, of course, you waste your garden space in planting second rate sorts. What you do want, is the very best early pea; the best succession pea, and the best late pea. For with these, supposing you plant all three sorts about the same time, they will come in so as to keep your table in peas till August. After that, if you are as fond of peas as I am, you will provide a second crop, or rather a couple of second crops of the early pea, for September and the early part of October, by sowing them again about the middle of August.

For the spring crop, you should commence sowing peas as soon as the frost is out of the ground - even it be the first of March, (or a month earlier at the south,) for peas are not tender chicks, like most other vegetables, being not a whit injured by a few very frosty nights, even when they are several inches high. If you have a warm sheltered piece of ground, on the south side of a fence or building, where you can plant a couple of drills as soon as the ground is mellow, then you will get the start of your neighbors who plant in the open garden - for the pea is easily coaxed forward by keeping the cold winds away from it. But much the best way of raising a very early crop of peas, if you like to get ahead of the season a little, is that described in the Horticulturist, vol. 1., p. 481, which I have tried for several years. I find, following out that plan, with very little trouble I can gain ten days over most of my neighbors, who have the sharpest gardeners, if they trust entirely to what can be done in the open air.

You tack these troughs loosely together, so that the nails can be easily drawn; you nearly fill them with good soil, planting a drill of peas in them, in the usual way, and you set them in any rough frame, (without dung or bottom heat.) This you must contrive to cover with sashes of some sort - or if you have no sashes, then with frames covered with cheap cotton, coated over with a little oil, to make it partly transparent. With such a frame, set in a sunny place, and covered with cotton stuff or sashes, you begin to start peas by the middle of February, or, if the season is late, the first of March. When they are about three or four inches high, and the season grows mild, you make a furrow in the kitchen-garden, set the troughs in the furrow: draw the nails; lift out the boards, pressing the earth gradually in their place, and then you have peas ready to stick when your earliest planting in the open ground is just breaking through the soil. The peas transplanted from the troughs in this way, don't know that they have been moved at all, and grow on, settling themselves as if they had been sown there, and had a "pre-emption right" to the ground.

Not much needs to be said about the soil for peas. They like a good soil, but the early sorts will grow on almost any land that can be dignified with the name of a garden. But if you look for rapid growth and good crops, your soil must be kept in good heart, for peas, as well as for every thing else, and the best way to do this is to ridge up the ground in the fall, after all the crops are taken off, digging-in a good dressing of fresh stable-manure when you are throwing it up into ridges. If this has not been done, and still here you are at the beginning of March, with spade in hand, and a bag of peas for planting lying before yon, you must make the most of it for the time. If your garden is rich, this will be done by marking out the drills, and sprinkling along them a light dressing of leached ashes, (about half as much as will fairly hide the soil in the drill,) cording this with a little soil, and planting the peas upon that. If your soil is poor, dig in a good dressing of any manure you can get - even fresh stable manure - over the whole ground, before you plant the peas.

Or, if manure is scanty, then mark out the drill, lay a dressing of manure upon it, and turn it under half a spade deep - smoothing all, and planting over the manured furrow in the common way.

"And what is the common way," somebody asks who never planted a pea in his life. It is as simple as ruling a copy book. You have only to mark off the newly dug ground into straight lines, (two and a-half feet apart, if you are planting early peas, or three and a-half if late ones,) open a drill about an inch deep, with a hoe, along these lines. Then drop the peas in this drill, about an inch apart. Some persons plant only a single line of peas in the drill, others make the drill as broad as the blade of the hoe, and scatter the peas an inch apart throughout the whole - and I recommend the last way as giving the largest crop. Of course, you must have such a thing as a garden line, to make a straight drill - for straight lines in the kithen-garden give it as much a look of neatness and order, as they do in the copy book. Having covered the peas, by drawing over them with the hoe all the earth that you pushed aside to make the drill, you have nothing to do but wait till they come up. When they have grown four or five inches high, and begin to put out their little feelers, or tendrils, you must provide something for them to catch hold of, either in the way of sharpened sticks, usually called "pea brush," or by stakes driven down every ten or fifteen feet on each side of the drills, with lines of twine stretched from one to the other.

Either makes a good support, but the branchy pea-brush is the best, because the most like nature's way of allowing vines to run over a bush. When you stick the peas, you must loosen the soil well, and draw a little up on each side, to help keep up the vines.

No doubt you expect me to tell you which are the very best peas for your own garden, for you have been puzzled, I dare say, by the many new and old names that you see in the seedsmen's catalogues. I will be glad to do this, for I have tried many of them, and am content with three; which, indeed, I think will give you the topmost flavor of this vegetable, as well as the most reliable and surest crops.

First then, Prince Albert, for the best early pea; second, the Champion of England, for the best large pea; and third, Knight's Tall Marrow, for the best summer crop.

Prince Albert is a variety of the old "Early Frame," or "Early Washington," of the same habit and flavor, (but rather more dwarf,) decidedly earlier, and I think a better bearer. At any rate, after trying it along side of the Early Frame, and Early Charlton, Cedo Nulli, and four or five others, for three years, I have given up all others as supplanted by the Prince Albert - now pretty generally admitted to be the best early pea.

Champion of England is a first rate marrowfat pea - the best of its class - and the very best large pea - tender and very sugary. It grows about three and a-half to four feet high, is a fine healthy plant, and bears most abundant crops. Planted at the same time as the early peas, it is fit to gather about three or four weeks later. The very large peas it bears are slightly shrivelled, and of a bluish cast in the dry state. If you are to have but two peas, this and the Prince Albert are the sorts for your money.

Knight's Tall Marrow, is the best of the tall late peas, bearing a long time, and giving a good crop. It is some objection to this sort, that it grows six feet high, and requires more room and pains in staking, than Knight's Dwarf Marrow, but it is a better and more prolific pea in strong soils. I am content with the Champion of England - a pea of the same class, and, therefore, should only cultivate this for variety, and for its being a little later. ,The Waterloo is something like it, but no so good.

Every body knows how to cook peas, or at least every body thinks so - and every body boils them. That is excellent, but by no means the only way to taste this vegetable in perfection; an Old Digger may not be supposed to know much about cooking, but in fact no place lies so close to the kitchen as the kitchen-garden, and it must be a dull digger who does not know something of what the cook does with his "truck." So I will tell you that the neatest little dishes that any cook ever sends to the table, are very small joints of lamb or veal, or perhaps a pair of spring chickens, stewed in a close pot or stew-pan very gently, oyer a slow fire, for two or three hours, till quite done, with peas; - butter, pepper, and salt, being added, of course. The juices of the meat penetrate the peas, and the flavor of the peas is given to the whole dish, so that I doubt if there was more savory dishes among the flesh-pots of Egypt, than one of these stews. These are the dishes for the dinners of small families, instead of the eternal steaks and cutlets, more than half of the time fried instead of broiled, that stare us in the face, "year in and year out," and which nobody can eat for a long time, without a fit of indigestion, unless it be some one who lives out of doors pretty much the whole time, and becomes as hardy as,

Tours, An Old Digger.