THEROSEOFMAY, 55 



bleached by long exposure to wind and weather; — there seemed no 

 life within or about it. Every trace of furniture and wainscot was 

 gone from its interior, and its principal rooms were the depositories 

 of old ploughs and disused ladders ; yet still its roof, floors and 

 windows were in decent repair. It had once upon a time been a 

 well conditioned house ; had been moated, and its garden-wall had 

 been terminated by stately stone pillars surmounted by well-cut 

 urns, one of which, at the time we were there, lay overgrown with 

 grass in the ground beneath; the other, after a similar fail, had 

 been replaced, but with the wrong end uppermost. To add still 

 more to its lonesomeness, thick, wild woods encompassed it on three 

 sides, whence, of an evening, and often too in the course of the day, 

 came the voices of owls and other gloomy wood-creatures. 



" There's not a flower in the garden," — said a woman who, with 

 her husband and child, we found to our astonishment, inhabiting 

 what had once been the scullery, — " not a flower but Feverfew and 

 the Rose of May, and you'll not think it worth getting." She was 

 mistaken ; I was delighted to And this sweet and favourite Rose in 

 so ruinous a situation. 



Again, w^e found it in the gardens of Annesley Hall, that most 

 poetical of old mansions ; and the ancient housekeeper, at that time 

 its sole inhabitant, pointed out this flower with a particular empha- 

 sis. " And here's the Rose of May," said she, draw ing out a slender 

 spray from a tangle of Jessamine that hung about the stone-work 

 of the terrace ; " a main pretty thing, though there's little store set 

 by it now-a-days." 



