A Talk with Flora and Pomona 207 



favorite lake owned by the immortals, of whose name, we 

 are sorry to say, we are at this moment entirely oblivious. 



Our readers will not, of course, expect us to repeat all 

 that passed during this enchanting interview. But, as we 

 are obliged to own that the visit was not altogether on our 

 own behalf, or rather that the turn of the discourse held 

 by our immortal guests showed that it was chielly intended 

 to be laid before the readers of the Horticulturist, we lose 

 no time in putting the latter en rapport. 



Pomona opened the discourse by a few graceful remarks, 

 touching the gratification it gave them that the moderns, 

 down to the present generation, had piously recognized her 

 guardian rights and those of her sister Flora, even while those 

 of many of the other Olympians, such as Jupiter, Pan, Vul- 

 can, and the like, were nearly forgotten. The wonderful fond- 

 ness for fruits and flowers, growing up in the western world, 

 had, she declared, not escaped her eye, and it received her 

 warmest approbation. She said something that we do not 

 quite remember, in the style of that good old phrase, of 

 "making the wilderness blossom like the rose," and de- 

 clared that Flora intended to festoon every cottage in 

 America with double Michigan roses, Wistarias, and sweet- 

 scented vines. For her own part, she said, her people were 

 busy enough in their invisible superintendence of the orchard 

 planting now going on at such a gigantic rate in America, 

 especially in the Western States. Such was the fever in 

 some of those districts, to get large plantations of fruit, that 

 she could not, for the life of her, induce men to pause long 

 enough to select their ground or the proper sorts of fruit 

 to be planted. As a last resort, to keep them a little in 

 check, she was obliged, against her better feelings, to allow 

 the blight to cut off part of an orchard now and then.* 

 Otherwise the whole country would be filled up with poor 

 miserable odds and ends from Europe - - " Beurres and 

 Bergamots, with more sound in their French names, than 

 flavor under their skins." 



* At this time the Rev. Henry Ward Beecher was writing his elaborate 

 (and unfortunately forgotten) thesis on the pear blight. - !'. A. W. 



