GARDEN ROSES 



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love of the pure and beautiful. Happy they who 

 retain or regain that love : and thankful am I that, 

 with regard to Roses, the child was father to the 

 man. Yes, I was a Rosarian cet. med IV., never to 

 be so happy again in this world as when the fingers, 

 which are writing now, plucked from the brook-side, 

 from the sunny bank, from the meadow and the 

 hedgerow and the wood, the violet, the primrose, the 

 cowslip, the orchis, and Ike Rose. Nay, about my 

 seventh summer I oft presided at a ' flower-show ' — 

 for thus we designated a few petals of this Provence 

 Rose, or of some other flower placed behind a piece 

 of broken glass, furtively appropriated when the 

 glazier was at dinner, and cutting, not seldom, our 

 small fingers (retribution swift upon the track of 

 crime), which we backed with newspaper turned over 

 the front as a frame or edging, and fastened from the 

 resources of our natural gums. 



And now, can any of my readers appease indigna- 

 tion and satisfy curiosity by informing me who first 

 called the Provence Rose ' Old Cabbage,' and why ? ^ 

 For myself, ' I should as soon have thought of calling 

 an earthquake genteel,* as Dr. Maitland remarked, 

 when an old lady near to him during an oratorio 



^ I am, sud rosd, well aware that (as Miller writes in his Dictionary) 

 the Cabbage Rose is so called ' because its petals are closely folded 

 over each other like cabbages.' 



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