112 A BOOK ABOUT THE GABDEN. 



corker "), I have testimony at hand to confirm my 

 statements ; and Mr. Evans is here, like the statue of 

 Horatius, " to witness if I He." He will readily recall 

 his great astonishment when I first began to speak to 

 him of flowers ; how he smiled encouragingly upon 

 me as a mother upon the baby just " beginning to take 

 notice " ("bless it ! " exclaims mamma; " it's worth a 

 million a minute ! " and nurse immediately follows 

 with, " Yes, mum, two ! ") ; and how he would gaze 

 upon me with an expression of kindly hope, as though 

 he were some good physician, watching in his patient 

 the first symptoms of recovery from delirious fever. 

 He will recollect how rapidly our rosarium spread, 

 since, as the poet of the seasons sings 



" By swift degrees the love of nature works, 

 And warms the bosom, till at last sublimed 

 To rapture and enthusiastic heat," 



until it finally invaded the kitchen-garden, and drove 

 out the asparagus at the point of the digging-fork ; 

 and he will rejoice with me in remembering the time 

 when our hostilities terminated ; when Mars was to 

 influence us no more, although that deity, according to 

 Hesiod, was the son of a flower, and not of a gun, as 

 one would be more disposed to imagine; when we 

 turned our bayonets into pruning-knives, our swords 

 into scythes, our mortars into garden-rollers, our 

 helmets into flower-pots, our uniforms into shreds for 

 the wall-trees, and our trumpet of war into a bird- 

 tenter's horn. 



You have seen a well-bred hunter turned out for 

 his summer's run, when the soft showers of April 



