To preserve chestnuts, so as to have them to sow in the spring, or to eat through the winter, you must make them perfectly dry after they come out of their green husk; then put them into a box or a barrel mixed with, and covered over by, fine and dry sand, three gallons of sand to one gallon of chestnuts. If there be maggots in any of the chestnuts, they will come out of the chestnuts and work up through the sand to get to the air; and thus you have your chestnuts sweet and sound and fresh.
Plums.
The Magnum Bonums are fit for nothing but tarts and sweetmeats. Magnum is right enough; but as to bonum, the word has seldom been so completely misapplied.
British Wines.
That which we call currant wine, is neither more nor less than red-looking, weak rum, the strength coming from the sugar; and gooseberry wine is a thing of the same character, and, if the fruit were of no other use than this, one might wish them to be extirpated. People deceive themselves. The thing is called wine, but it is rum; that is to say, an extract from sugar.
Birds.
The wild pigeons in America live, for about a month, entirely upon the buds of the sugar-maple, and are killed by hundreds of thousands, by persons who erect bough-houses, and remain in a maple wood with guns and powder and shot for that purpose. If we open the craw of one of these little birds, we find in it green stuff of various descriptions, and, generally, more or less of grass, and, therefore, it is a little too much to believe, that, in taking away our buds, they merely relieve us from the insects that would, in time, eat us up. Birds are exceedingly cunning in their generation; but, luckily for us gardeners, they do not know how to distinguish between the report of a gun loaded with powder and shot, and one that is only loaded with powder. Very frequent firing with powder will alarm them so that they will quit the spot, or, at least, be so timid as to become comparatively little mischievous.