8o A BOOK ABOUT ROSES. 



in accordance with ways and means. Let 

 Horticulture in this matter learn a lesson from 

 her younger sister ; and let the gardener who is 

 whimpering over his rood of unkindly soil remem- 

 ber what the farmer has done and is doing, the 

 wide world over, amid the forest and the fen. And 

 such pusillanimity is specially comic in the case of 

 a Scotsman or Englishman who is surrounded by 

 a thousand proofs of triumphant cultural skill ; 

 who may walk, from dawn to dusk, among golden 

 corn, where once the antlered monarch spent his 

 life, unscared by hound or arrow ; among flocks 

 and herds, knee-deep in herbage, where fifty years 

 ago the blackcock crowed amid the purple heather, 

 where 



" The coot was swimming in the reedy pond, 

 Beside the water-hen, so soon affrighted ; 

 And where, by whispering sedge, the heron, fond 

 Of solitude, ahghted." 



"Richard" — thus I spoke to the indolent and 

 obese proprietor of a small freehold in my neigh- 

 borhood, who was complaining to me that his 

 garden, about as highly cultivated as Mariana's at 

 the Moated Grange, was viciously and desperately 



you have got the only garden in all Lincolnshire which could grow 

 such blooms." " And I brought it there," my friend responded, " in 

 a wheelbarrow." 



