212 A BOOK ABOUT THE GARDEN. 



I went into training forthwith. I studied the 

 catalogues more closely than ever, and added a 

 hundred trees to my stock. I remembered, with the 

 liveliest and most unchristian gratification, that 

 Jones showed his roses in ginger-beer bottles, and 

 that Mr. Lane, of Berkhampstead, had kindly ex- 

 plained to me all the details of his exhibition boxes, 

 and had lent me a zinc tube for a pattern. Oh, 

 would I not astonish my friend, and punish him for 

 his execrable disloyalty in sticking the Flower Queen 

 into a pop-bottle ! 



There is excitement in the small bosom of the 

 schoolboy, who has just returned for his Christmas 

 holidays, and is to hunt on the morrow. He roams 

 restlessly upstairs and downstairs, from his bedroom 

 where, attired in his new " riding pants," he has 

 been surveying himself for the fourteenth time to 

 the stable, where abides the jumping cob, and where 

 he never wearies of hearing from the groom that he 

 "needn't turn 'im from nothing." And won't he 

 astonish Master Brown, his schoolmate and neighbour, 

 who is sure to be out "on that one-eyed brute of a 

 pony " ; and won't he gallop past Puncher maximus, 

 who has thrashed him liberally during the last half, 

 if he can only catch him in some dirty lane ! He 

 cracks his hunting-whip in the hall ; he " who-ops " 

 in the shrubberies ; and, finally, retires to dream that 

 he has " pounded " all the field over an extra-sized 

 canal, and that as he flies over its sullen waters, the 

 head of Puncher maximus bobs up, and fixes on him 

 a look of envy and despair. 



And thus did I, on the eve of my first Piose-Show, 



