68 



A BOOK ABOUT ROSES 



gardener, whether his inferiority is caused by want 

 of knowledge or want of industry (the latter as a 

 rule), is always snarling at his soil. Whatever fails 

 — flowers, fruits, or vegetables, shrubs or trees — the 

 fault rests ever with the soil. Hearing some of these 

 malcontents declaim, you would almost conclude that 

 a tree, planted over- night, would be discovered next 

 morning prostrate upon its back, ejected by the soil 

 in disgust. Only by superhuman efforts, they will 

 assure you, combined with extraordinary talent, can 

 anything be induced to grow but weeds. The place 

 might be, like Hood's Haunted House, 



* Under some prodigious ban 

 Of excommunication ' — 



a place from which Jupiter had warned Phoebus and 

 Zephyrus and Pomona and Flora, on pain of hot 

 thunderbolts. They come there, of course, from a 

 spirit of disobedience, but only on the sly, and 

 seldom. The old, old story — the muff, coming from 

 his wicket with his second cipher, and blaming the 

 uneven ground, the ball which 'broke in' with a 

 wild defiance of every natural law, and baffled all 

 that science knew ; the bad shot, whose ' beast of a 

 gun ' is always on half-cock when the rare woodcock 

 comes, and on whose eyes the sun sheds ever his 

 extra-dazzling rays ; the bad rider, who ' never gets 



