The ordinary prunes sold in the shops are the fruit of the St. Julian plum, a common species which is grown everywhere in France for the purpose. The best French or dessert plums come from Provence, and the Californian plums must be of the same variety as the Brignole plum. The latest competitor in the English market is Bosnia, and those which I have tried were quite as good as the French plums. Under Austrian rule, Bosnia has developed wonderfully, and the climate is a delightful one, well suited to fruit growing. The best of all the French dried prunes come from Provence, the land of poetry and romance. They are made of the kinds of prunes called the _Perdrigon blanc_, and _Violette_, and _Prune d’Ast_. The two former come under one category and are called _Pruneaux de Brignole_, from the place where they are prepared, the small town of Brignole, in Provence, a name I am sure you will have often seen on the boxes of prunes used for dessert. The common kinds of prunes are gathered by merely shaking the trees; but those for preparing as French plums must be gathered in the morning, before the sun is up, by taking hold of the stalk without touching the fruit and laying each plum very gently on vine leaves in baskets. The latter must be filled without the plums being allowed to touch each other, and then they are carried to the fruit-room and exposed to the sun and air for three or four days, after which they become quite soft. The next process is to put them on trays into a spent oven and shut up quite closely for twenty-four hours. Then they are taken out, the oven is re-heated, and made rather warmer, and the plums are put in again for the same time; then they are taken out, carefully turned over, and the oven is heated to one-fourth hotter than it was before, and the plums are returned to it again for the third time, and after remaining the twenty-four hours, are taken out and left exposed till they become quite cold. Then comes the most curious part of the process, which, when once explained to me, was a solution of an enigma over which I had much wondered, namely, why the stones of the good French plums are loose and unattached, while those of the common prune are so much more fixed in the fleshy substance of the fruit. This part of the process is called “rounding,” and is performed by turning the stones in the plums without breaking the skins, and the two ends are then pressed between the thumb and finger to flatten the fruit. Then they are once more laid on the sieves for drying and placed in a rather hot oven for one hour, the oven being closely shut. Lastly, they are put again into a cool oven, left for twenty-four hours, when the process is ended, and they are packed in bottles or boxes for sale and exportation. Now I have given this long account, taken from a recent authority, because I know my readers of the “G. O. P.” are world-spread, and because this is the kind of process adopted with any