I find, on looking about my garden, talking with fruit growers, and looking through the pages of your paper, that it is an undeniable fact, that a good deal more difficulty is experienced in cultivating the pear than any other of the popular fruit-trees.

The time was, indeed, when pear-trees - great, strong, lofty trees, too, though the fruit was rather ckokey - grew around every farm-house, bore cart-loads of fruit annually, and were looked upon as able to "stand more hard knocks" than even an apple-tree. Longer lived the pear-tree certainly is, by nature; and, as standing venerable proofs of this, I refer you to the Endicott Pear-tree, near Salem, and the Stuyvesant Pear-tree, in New York. As both of these trees are above two centuries old - by veritable records - it is not worth while to spend time in proving that the pear is, naturally, a long-lived tree.

But, in fact, natural pear-trees - that is to say, the chance seedlings of the com-mon pear that spring up by the sides of lanes and fences - are as hardy and as great bearers now as they ever were. What, then, is the matter with all the sorts whose tenderness our fruit growers groan over?

Is it not owing to the delicate constitutions which these foreign varieties, bred in a more regular climate, have, and which makes them peculiarly alive to our great excesses of heat and cold?

Is it not true, in rich and deep soils, where delicate trees are forced into a sappy condition, when the limbs are too full of juices, upon which the frost or sun acts readily, that blight and other diseases of the pear are most frequent.

Is it not true that foreign varieties of pear, especially those originated within the last few years, are far more delicate and liable to disease than native sorts of equal merit, raised from seed in this country?

I throw oat these queries to set some of your ingenious and practical correspondents, in various parts of the country, at work to furnish materials for answers that will settle some knotty points. For my own part, I have made up my mind that, to grow fine pears for profit, we must, in order to save the trees and keep them sound, keep the trunks and leading branches covered with a light sheathing of straw all the year round. This guards the bark of the principal parts of the tree from all excesses of heat and cold. I have experimented for four years past with this plan of sheathing, and can say that I am quite satisfied with it. Among three dozen pear-trees now just come into bearing, one-third of them have been kept in straw, and not a single one of that dozen has suffered by blight or other disease; while, of the remaining two dozen, nearly one-half have dropped off, and been dug and consigned to the brush heap. Some careless farmer or gardener - fond of shirking everything that he can - will say: "But who can take the trouble to straw all his pear-trees?"

You can, is my reply. Try it on half a dozen trees, and keep an account of the time and labor spent in it. It will amount to a few cents per tree - not the price of half a peck of Virgalieus in the York market. And if you can gather pears by the cart-load - for no fruit ripens better, or has a higher flavor, than the pear, in this climate - if, I say, you can gather pears every year by the cart-load for only the trouble of strawing the trees, then the blight take you if you are too lazy to do it 1 An Old Digger.