Letter from Champaign.

The snow continues to accumulate, the last having fallen before midnight the 11th. There were only about two inches, but it is drifting this morning, for all it is worth, before a gale from the West. The first and second snows stay where they were put at first, but the subsequent ones are in drifts or scattered all abroad, in the many snows and the excellence of the sleighing, this winter resembles '78-'79, but there is more snow and the temperature is very much more severe. I suppose there is well-nigh eighteen inches now on the ground, something quite unusual in this latitude. Let us hope it will stay sometime longer yet, and save the fall wheat.

The intensely cold weather of last week was rough on stock of all kinds and in all conditions, and particularly hard on that portion having short rations. But I have seen many worse storms and much harder weather for stock; none however in which the fruits, small or large, suffered worse. At least that is the general judgment at the present. Peach buds are killed of course, and it will be lucky if the trees have escaped. All blackberries, but the Snyder, are dead down to the snow line—and some think the Snyder has not escaped, for reasons given further on. Examinations made of the buds of Bartlett, Duchess, Howell, Tyson, Bigarreau, Seckel, Buffum, Easter Buerre, and others yesterday, showed them all to be about equally frosted and blackened, and probably destroyed. Last year our pears suffered a good deal from the sleet of the second of February, which clung to the trees ten days, and the crop was a light one. This year, if appearances can be trusted, there will be less. In the many intense freezes of the last twenty-five years, I have never known pear buds to be seriously injured; last year being a marked exception and this still more so. Hardy grapes have probably suffered as much, and the tender varieties are completely done for. How well the May cherry has resisted the low temperature remains to be seen. As for the sweet cherries, it is probably the end of them.

There were buds set for an unusually abundant crop of apples in 1884—the Presidential year. The hardy varieties have escaped material damage, no doubt, but some of the tender Eastern varieties, like the Baldwin, Roxbury Russet, in all reasonable probability, have not only lost their buds but their lives also.

The disasters following the very low temperature of last week have no doubt been increased by the immaturity of the wood, due to the cool, moist summer. If summers like those of 1882-83 are not warm enough to ripen the corn crop, buds and wood of fruit trees will not acquire a maturity that resists intense cold as we see by our experience with pears, grapes, and peaches in the fruit season of 1883, and which is almost sure to be repeated with aggravations in 1884. Possibly the ground being but lightly frozen and protected by a good coat of snow, may save the apple trees and others from great disaster following thirty to thirty-five degrees below zero, when falling on half ripened wood, but the reasonable fear is that orchards on high land in Northern and Central Illinois, have been damaged more than last year. If so perhaps it were better after all, since it will open the eyes of a great many to the mistakes in location heretofore made, and lead them to put out future orchards where they ought to be.

If my word of warning could reach those engaged in taking measures at Washington to prevent the spread of epidemic and infectious diseases in our stock, it would be "go slow." If the wishes of a few veterinarians are met and the demands of a raft of pauper lawyers and politicians are complied with, it will result in the creation of a half dozen commissions. Each one of them, as previous ones have done, will find sufficient reason for their continuance and reports will be made that half the live stock in the country, South and West, is either in danger from or suffering under some of the many forms of epidemic or infectious diseases—and by the way, what justice is there in putting Detmers out of the way, and clinging to Salmon and Laws, both of whom indorsed nearly every thing the former did? Beware of commissions, and above all of putting men upon them whose bread and butter is of more consequence to them than the stock interest, vast as it is.

B. F. J.