oracle — you ask whether the good old sorts
still remain at par in the market, and Jove
replies, with a complacent nod, that they are
a wholesale staple article of public consumption.
" This bed," he says, " entirely of Bath
white moss, has been budded to order for
America." You then look round and decide
upon your plants, combining a sprinkling of
the unknown and the speculative with a
larger proportion of the approved and the true.
And, then, a sharp magisterial voice rings
the dinner-bell with the tongue of authority.
You dare not remain longer in the garden,
even if you wished to, which you probably do
not ; for, immediately after crossing the
threshold of the side door, you enter, to the
left, a neat, snug little parlour with the
window open, staring point-blank at the
roses, and a little white-clothed table, hardly
big enough for your party, but tending much
to merriment and good fellowship. You take
your seats, and instantly stern Minerva drops
amidst you such mutton-chops, such green
peas, such potatoes, and such melted-butter,
followed by such a currant tart and such a
rice pudding, that — oh ! — words may express
thoughts, but not sensations. The goddess
concludes her miraculous performance by the
production of a cream-cheese of her own
manufacture. Expressions of your
appreciation and delight burst from your lips,
and — marvel of marvels she smiles ! Then,
a bottle of wonderful port, and an invitation
to the master to partake of it ; he obeys the
summons, and sets on the table a dish of
Elton strawberries and a green-fleshed melon,
grown in some hole and corner stolen from
the roses. Then you ride your hobby-horses
full gallop : how such a thing, sent out at
such a price, turns out no better than a
handful of coloured rags ; how so-and-so's
stupid gardener committed an outrageous
donkeyism : how such another's inventive
genius would produce leaves and flowers from
a ten-year-old broomstick ; how this year's
committee of the Highanmityshire Horticultural
Society is working ; and, above all,
whether the rose-fever has yet attained its
climax. Then you stroll once more round
the garden to fix upon a few additional
protégés ; you drink a parting cup of tea ;
Smiler takes his place between the shafts ;
you drive homeward through the cool evening
breeze, and, as you watch the glowworms
lighting their lamps amidst the dewy
wayside grass, you make a vow never more
to judge of a woman's good qualities by her
looks alone. Verily, rose-gardens are bits of
consecrated ground, cut out and separate
from common earth. If you could drop into
the midst of this one, at the end of July, after
having been shut up for nine months in a
smoky city, you would go down on your
knees before the flowers.

Roses have had a good deal to go through ;
it is true they have had a good long
while to go through it in. When I began
rose-growing, nobody would look upon a
rose in any other light than as a pretty
sort of thing very well for school-boys to
talk about after a course of Virgil, Horace
and Anacreon, and permissible for
kind-hearted old maids to shelter in the obscure
retreats of their obsolete gardens; but as,
florist's flowers, the idea was not to be
entertained. Dahlias then were all the rage, and
were carrying off exclusively, innumerable
silver cups, tea-spoons, sugar-tongs, medals,
certificates, and highly-commendeds. Mr.
Cathill (horticulturist, Camberwell,) records
that when Mr. Rivers first began to speculate
largely in rose-growing, his old foreman, long
since gone to his last resting-place, came one
day, with a very grave face, and said,

"Master Tom, you are surely out of your
mind. What are you going to do with all
those brambles? It is a shame to plant them
on land that would grow standard apples!"

And so it was with myself and my friend: a
lady, who imported the art from France into
our neighbourhood, and who did me the
honour to make me her disciple. We were
looked upon as benighted heretics, humanely
tolerated as amusing enthusiasts, and just
escaped ostracism as heterodox gardeners;
because, while others were running mad after
Mexican tubers with repulsive effluvia, alike
offensive to man and beast, we cared only to
complete our respective collections of a
hundred fine varieties of the rose. If many were
too polite to say so, they certainly thought, that
it was a burning shame, so it was, to grow
nasty prickly roses in a garden that would
produce double dahlias; and the scorn of the
public attained its height when they heard of
our begging ladies for their worn-out parasols
to shade both our very dark crimson and our
double-yellow blooms,and when they overheard
us rejoicing at a pic-nic water-party when a
thunder-storm drove muslin skirts and white
chip bonnets pell-mell below the hatches,—
that the delicious shower came just in time
to save our last-inserted buds! But it is a
long lane which has no turning; and the
poor neglected roses soon came to a path
which led them to make their triumphal
entry. I daily make use of some convenient
plate, engraved with the cyphers H.H.S.,
which my roses won at the Highanmityshire
shows. My roses and I well-deserved the
reward thus bestowed in the shape of pieces
of silver; for I worked them all with my own
proper fingers, and they exerted themselves
to the utmost to return the obligation.

I strained just now at the word individual,
as applied to plants; because it has
been a question, among the dons of
vegetable physiology, What is an individual in the
world of botany? and judgment has been
pronounced that a bud is an individual. A
bulb, therefore, such as a Tripoli onion
(which is nothing more than an overgrown
bud), may claim to be no more than a simple
individual; but an oak-tree is a herd, a crowd,