110 A BOOK ABOUT THE GARDEN. 



been describing a rose) this guide to amateurs, 

 which has brought so much happiness to the neo- 

 phyte, so much instruction to the learner, so many 

 glad memories and genial sympathies to all rose- 

 growers, quite completed my conversion. In that 

 pleasant manual there is a hearty, loyal fondness 

 for the theme, a. truthfulness of description, which 

 cannot fail to charm. It seems to say, with the 

 perfumed earth in the Persian fable, " I am not the 

 rose; but cherish me, for we have dwelt together;" 

 and there is fragrance as of roses among its leaves. 

 There can hardly be a treatise with less affectation 

 and superfluity, so genuine, explicit, and natural, and 

 so perfect a transcript of the man from whom it 

 comes, that when I made his acquaintance, some 

 years after my transformation, he exactly verified 

 my expectations, and it was like meeting with an old 

 and valued friend. 



And thus I discovered, if not "books in the 

 running brooks," a most fascinating volume in the 

 Rivers of Hertfordshire, and in I plunged, as keen as 

 Cassius (to Caesar's unspeakable disgust), and as 

 eagerly as a hot schoolboy taking " a header " into 

 his favourite pool, truant it may be, and destined 

 after his ablutions to the coarsest kind of towelling, 

 but for the time as oblivious of all the ills which the 

 fleshier part of youth is heir to, as though he bathed 

 in Lethe. And just as this amphibious juvenile 

 will emerge from time to time, and diversify his 

 sport by a periodical canter in the flowery mead, so I 

 quitted my Rivers at intervals, and wandering among 

 rny roses (I had but a dozen then) tendered my 



