16 GARDENS OF THE LOUVRE AND THE TUILERIES. 



more gratification by showing them what orange trees really 

 are, than all they have ever enjoyed through the vast sums 

 that have been spent upon orange trees for several hundred 

 years past. They were all very well in an age when exotics, 

 and above all such attractive exotics as the orange, were 

 rare, and when good glass-houses were unknown, and bad 

 ones impossibly dear ; but now, when we have thousands of 

 choice exotics grown in perfection everywhere around us, the 

 present condition of these fine old trees should not be tole- 

 rated. They should be planted out in a conservatory 

 worthy of the city, or be done away with. 



There are, however, some circumstances in which the 

 culture of plants in tubs for placing in the open air in 

 summer may not only be tolerable, but desirable. At 

 Geneva I once saw, opposite a restaurant, the finest specimen 

 of the fragrant Pittosporum Tobira that I ever met with, 

 and was informed it had been in a cellar all the winter. 

 Such as the orange trees are, however, they have admirers, 

 most of whom believe that they cannot be grown to such per- 

 fection by the same method in England. This is not the 

 case : the method pursued in northern France (which is 

 described in another chapter) will succeed almost equally 

 well in the south of England and Ireland. 



Let us wait a moment to look at these people feeding the 

 birds, so much to their own amusement and also that of the 

 lookers-on. It is a pretty sight, and seems to afford great 

 pleasure to many people, and doubtless much more to the 

 successful feeders. It is quite a little scene in the gardens 

 every day, and on fine days it attracts numbers of people, 

 though it is an every-day occurrence there. The Jardin des 

 Tuileries is inhabited by a great number of the common 

 ringdove, or " quest" — those wild pigeons which in 

 Britain and elsewhere, when in a wild state, flash away from 

 man like an arrow from the bow. In these and other 

 gardens in Paris they seem perfectly at home, and perch at 

 ease in the trees over the heads of the multitudes of children 

 who play, and of people who walk on fine days. Their in- 

 timacy does not extend further, except with their friends 

 who come to feed them now and then. Here is an instance. 



