122 
RURAL HOURS. 
Jersey tea," for instance, a pretty shrub, and the " Labrador tea," 
a low evergreen with handsome white flowers. Certainly it was 
only fair that the women should have their share of privations in 
the shape of pins and tea, when Washington and his brave army 
were half clad, half armed, half starved, and never paid ; the 
soldiers of that remarkable war, both officers and men, if not lit- 
erally using the spines of the thorn-tree, like their wives, often 
went about looking something like Spenser's picture of Despair : 
*' His garments naught but many ragged clouts, 
With thorns together pinned, and patched was." 
In some farm-houses where much knitting and spinning is going 
on, one occasionally sees a leafless branch of a thorn-bush hanging 
in a corner, with a ball of yarn on each spine : quite a pretty, rus- 
tic device. We saw one the other day which we admired very 
much. 
Monday, 18 th. — Lovely day; thermometer 82 in the shade at 
dinner-time. The wild roses are in flower. We have them of 
three varieties : the early rose, with reddish branches, which seldom 
blooms here until the first week in June ; the low rose, with a 
few large flowers ; and the tall many-flowered swamp rose, blooming 
late in the summer. They are quite common about us, and al- 
though the humblest of their tribe, they have a grace all their 
own ; there is, indeed, a peculiar modesty about the wild rose 
which that of the gardens does not always possess. There is one 
caprice of the gardening art to-day which a rustic finds it difficult 
to admire, and that is the tall grafted tree roses taking a form 
which nature assuredly never yet gave to a rose-biish. The flow- 
ers themselves may be magnificent as flowers, but one stares at 
them with curiosity, one does not turn to them with aff'ection ; 
