86 THE ROSE. 
no longer disgrace an enlightened age; but 
beyond the contribution of this occasional 
homily, it is, of course, no affair of ours. 
Each man assures his neighbor that the pro- 
cess of desiccation is quite easy, and the art 
of deodorizing almost nice; but nobody ‘goes 
in.” The reader, I have no doubt, has with 
me had large experience of this perversity in 
neighbors, and ofttimes has been perplexed 
and pained by their dogged strange reluc- 
tance to follow the very best advice. There 
was at Cambridge, some thirty years ago, an 
insolent, foul-mouthed, pugnacious sweep, 
who escaped for two terms the sublime lick- 
ing which he ‘annexed’ finally, because no 
one liked to tackle the soot. There were 
scores of undergraduates to whom pugilism 
was a thing of beauty and a joy forever, who 
had the power and the desire to punish his 
impudence, but they thought of the close 
wrestle—they reflected on the ‘hug,’ and 
left him. To drop metaphor, there is no 
more valuable manure; but it is, from cir- 
cumstances which require no explanation, 
more suitable for the farm than the garden, 
especially as we have asubstitute [farm-yard 
manure] quite as efficacious, and far more 
convenient and agreeable in use.” * 
* “A Book about Roses,’”’ S. Reynolds Hole. 
