My Dear Editor:--You could not have visited the prairie country at a more unpropitious season, for a succession of heavy rains had submerged the country, and my own grounds being torn up for tree-planting, road-making, and the like, must have presented a forbidding appearance.

Still your partial eyes discovered, it seems, something to be pleased with, as you desire me "after reading the Horticulturist" to write " a defence of the prairies." From this I inferred that you designed throwing us upon the defensive, but in the absence of an attack, where is the occasion of a vindication 1

My preference for the prairies may be accounted for in a very few words.

Mountains figure more pleasantly in the eye and on the canvas of the painter than profitably in the domain of the husbandman. This needs no argument. Dense forests have their advantages and their disadvantages, the latter greatly preponderating. One generation cut down the timber and die. The next, seized with the malady incident to newly-cleared land, root out the stumps and shake to death. The third generation only begin to profit by the labor of their ancestors, from whom, with the record of thir hardships and physical ills, they inherit also an occasional quaking.

And now let us turn to the prairie and find its rich, deep loam all ready for the plow, and promising exhaustless fertility. This wealth of soil and the freedom from rugged hills, from rocks, from stumps and from trees, (except in occasional groves which furnish abundant fuel,) and from other impediments to easy and profitable agriculture, prove indisputably the admirable adaptation of our prairies to the wants of the husbandman. But to the lover of Nature the prairie has attractions, apart from its ready and abundant rewards to the industrious son of the soil.

As I write, an almost limitless expanse of prairie stretches out before me, bounding the vision only with the horizon. The undulations, the groves and creeks prevent monotony. The depth of soil favors the most luxuriant growth of grain, and grass, and flowers, and this vast plain is clad in verdure of such depth of tone and with bloom of such exquisite hues, that I am confident were you here to witness it, and to see the occasional groves in richest foliage, and vast flocks of grazing sheep and cattle diversifying the scene, you would agree with me in pronouncing it enchantingly beautiful.

But one of my men has come in to tell me that some thousands of feet of tile (for the lawn) and an underdrain mole machine (for general use on the farm) have arrived, and I must be out to look after them. I have been planting extensively, etc.,&o. B., Illinois.