THE SIX OF SPADES. 139 



who perished so suddenly in the bloom of his youth 

 and in his opera hat had pleaded with tears for a 

 verdict of ranicide, and a big deodand on the ox, no 

 honest frog could have forgotten for a moment the 

 plain demands of duty. 



And yet, my brother Spades, it has been not seldom 

 affirmed in my hearing by several horticultural frogs, 

 who have burst themselves that is to say, have com- 

 pletely ruined their gardens by extravagant efforts to 

 reproduce, for their neighbours' astonishment, the 

 outlines of a certain modern ox, known to us by the 

 name of "Bedding-Out" that their dissolution was 

 murder, and not suicide. " See," they have cried in 

 the crisis of evisceration, in their anything but happy 

 despatch, "how this detestable monster has ruined 

 our little plot, broken down our flowering- shrubs, 

 crushed our herbaceous plants, and left us nothing, 

 in place of our sweet unfailing beauty, but a brief and 

 scentless glare ! " The very men who hacked down 

 and uprooted their laburnums and lilacs, and weigelas 

 and pyrus, and berberis and ribes, with all the energy 

 and exultation of backwoodsmen, who sentenced 

 their old herbaceous favourites to transportation for 

 life, and rejoiced to consign them, packed like convicts 

 in crowded wheel-barrows, to penal settlements in the 

 kitchen-garden I have heard them, and so have you, 

 plaintively protesting against their own free act and 

 deed, as though it had been done at point of bayonet, 

 and as though ever} 7 hesitation and entreaty of theirs 

 had only been answered by an extra prod. The fact 

 is, that in this matter of bedding-out, a large number 

 of our brotherhood have felt, with good reason, 



