of your druggist white hellebore, scald and mix a tablespoonful in a bowl of hot water, and then pour it in a full watering-can.  This gives you an infusion of about a tablespoonful to an ordinary pail of water at its ordinary summer temperature.  Sprinkle the infected bushes with this as often as there is a worm to be seen.  I have never failed in destroying the pests by this course.  It should be remembered, however, that new eggs are often hatched out daily.  You may kill every worm to-day, yet find plenty on the morrow.  Vigilance, however, will soon so check the evil that your currants are safe; and if every one would fight the pests, they would eventually be almost exterminated.  The trouble is that, while you do your duty, your next-door neighbor may grow nothing on his bushes but currant-worms.  Thus the evil is continued, and even increased, in spite of all that you can do; but by a little vigilance and the use of hellebore you can always save your currants.  I have kept my bushes green, luxuriant, and loaded with fruit when, at a short distance, the patches of careless neighbors were rendered utterly worthless.  Our laws but half protect the birds, the best insecticides, and there is no law to prevent a man from allowing his acres to be the breeding-place of every pest prevailing.

There are three species of the currant-borer, and their presence is indicated by yellow foliage and shrivelling fruit.  The only remedy is to cut out and burn the affected stems.  These pests are not often sufficiently numerous to do much harm.

I earnestly urge that virulent poisons like Paris green, London purple, etc., never be used on fruit or edible vegetables.  There cannot be safety in this course.  I never heard of any one that was injured by white hellebore, used as I have directed; and I have found that if the worms were kept off until the fruit began to ripen, the danger was practically over.  If I had to use hellebore after the fruit was fit to use, I should first kill the worms, and then cleanse the bushes thoroughly by spraying them with clean water.

In treating the two remaining small fruits, blackberries and strawberries, we pass wholly out of the shade and away from trees.  Sunshine and open ground are now required.  Another important difference can also be mentioned, reversing former experience.  America is the home of these fruits.  The wild species of the blackberry abroad has never, as far as I can learn, been developed into varieties worthy of cultivation; and before importations from North and South America began, the only strawberry of Europe was the Alpine, with its slight variations, and the musky Hautbois.

I do not know whether any of our fine varieties of blackberries are cultivated abroad, but I am perfectly certain that they are worthy of the slight attention required to raise them in perfection here.

Like the blackcaps, all our best varieties are the spontaneous products of Nature, first discovered growing wild, and transferred to the garden.  The blackberry is a fruit that takes kindly to cultivation, and improves under it.