CHAPTER XXIII 

 A TALK WITH FLORA AND POMONA * 



WE beg leave to inform such of our readers as may be 

 interested, that we have lately had the honor of a 

 personal interview with the distinguished deities 

 that preside over the garden and the orchard, Flora and 

 Pomona. 



The time was a soft balmy August night; the scene was a 

 leafy nook in our own grounds, where, after the toils of the 

 day, we were enjoying the dolce far niente of a hammock, 

 and wondering at the necessity of any thing fairer or diviner 

 than rural nature, and such moonlight as then filled the 

 vaulted heaven, bathed the tufted foreground of trees, the 

 distant purple hills, and 



"Tipt with silver all the fruit tree tops." 



It was a scene for an artist; yet, as we do not write for 

 the Court Journal, we must be pardoned for any little 

 omission in the costumes or equipages of the divinities 

 themselves. Indeed, we were so thoroughly captivated with 

 the immortal candor and freshness of the goddesses, that 

 we find many of the accessories have escaped our memory. 

 Pomona's breath, however, when she spoke, filled the air 

 with the odor of ripe apricots, and she held in her left hand 

 a fruit, which we immediately recognized as one of the golden 

 apples of the Hesperides, (of which she knew any gardener 

 upon earth would give his right hand for a slip), and which 

 in the course of our interview, she acknowledged was the 



* Original date of September, 1847. It is hoped that the reader of 

 to-day is not so thoroughly steeped in the Mutt and Jeff humor of the 

 colored Sunday supplement as to miss the pleasant and restrained chaffing 

 of this essay. The pecadillos here satirized have not altogether disap- 

 peared from the horticultural world. -- F. A. W. 



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