CHAPTER X. 



GARDEN ROSES. 



Soox after the publication of my last chapter,* I received 

 from a furio-comic amateur the following epistle : — 



Sir, — I wish to be informed what the Two in Whist you mean by leaving 

 me on the i st of April, vlt. , in a ridiculous costume and a crowded anteroom, 

 quietly proposing to keep me there for a month. My legs, sir, cannot be 

 included among "varieties suitable for exhibition." They have, on the con- 

 trary, been described too truly by a sarcastic street-boy as "bad uns to stop a 

 pig in a gate," and you might at least have clothed them in the black velvet 

 trousers recently and reasonably introduced. Moreover, I hate anterooms. 

 They remind me of disagreeable epochs — of waiting in custom-houses for lug- 

 gage, which was not, perhaps, quite what moral luggage should be ; of dreary 

 dining-rooms belonging to dentists, where, surveying with nervous rapidity the 

 photographic album, and wondering over the portrait of Mrs Dentist, how that 

 pretty face could have wed with forceps, lancet, and file, I have heard kicks 

 and groans from the ^^ drawing-room 2^0^^^'' " oh-ohs " from the chair which 

 I was about to fill. They recall to memory rooms scholastic, in which I lis- 

 tened for the approach of lictor and fasces, and from which, though mounted 

 and with my back turned to the enemy, I had no power to flee. They bring 

 to recollection rooms collegiate, sombre, walled with books, where with other 



* In the Gardener. 



