Rose-showing. 133 



door decoration, it would prove worth growing for that purpose 

 alone. 



SHOWING ROSES IN FRANCE. A Rose-growing friend has sug- 

 gested to me that it might be well to mention any novelties in 

 arrangement adopted by the French in showing Roses, but I know 

 of little worthy of recommendation. The great exhibition of Roses 

 at Brie Comte Robert surprising accounts of which appeared in 

 the daily papers at the time was, in some respects, a very different 

 affair to what might have been expected from the accounts of it 

 spread abroad. Brie Comte Robert is situated in a very pleasant 

 country, twenty miles or so from Paris a country without hedges 

 or ditches, yet picturesque and pretty from the number of fruit 

 trees dotted over the land, and with (at the time of my visit) the 

 ears of ripening wheat bending into the straight well-made roads 

 a country with rich sandy loam and gentle hills, like parts of Kent, 

 but for the main part covered with wide level spreads of wheat and 

 vines. Brie Comte Robert is an ordinary and rather straggling 

 little French town, with an interesting old church traced with the 

 beautiful art of the olden time, and grey with the lichens of a 

 thousand years ; and finally, Brie Comte Robert has a fete and 

 Rose show, as all the world has been informed. The Rose- 

 show, although pretty and remarkable of its kind, is not quite a 

 marvel, but simply an adjunct of the village fair. Now, the fete of 

 a small place like this is not at first sight, or when examined in 

 detail, a thing to be enraptured with. Imagine a grassy yard or 

 small field, in the centre of which are a few tables and the little 

 hut of a person who divines the future ; and here, and all around, 

 a lot of small, meagre, clout-covered tents occupied with various 

 things, from temporary restaurants and gingerbread stalls down to 

 diminutive billiards and little games in which the yokels of the dis- 

 trict invest a sou a time, and now and then win a trifling work of art 

 worth about a centime. Imagine, in short, the mildest and smallest 

 corner of Donnybrook fair with every drop of " divilmint" squeezed 

 out of it, and you have a pretty good idea of the sight that greeted 



