66 
CHOICE BRITISH FERNS. 
the foes of our wild Ferns; but our private collections are 
not always safe from spoilers of allied character. We have 
heard of them assuming the shape of gardeners of low degree, 
whose ravages embrace plants, pots, and all, nothing being 
left but a gap in the collection, and an assumed look of 
bewilderment on the spoiler’s face as to “Who could ha’ 
done it.” 
Sometimes they appear in the guise of nice young ladies, 
who, professing intense admiration of your pets, are made 
the temporarily happy possessors of a few choice forms, which, 
when inquired after in a week or two, are found to have 
died in a most mysterious and incomprehensible fashion; the 
fact being that your advice regarding their culture went in 
at one ear and out at the other; or Mary the maid stupidly 
forgot to water them; or they could not be planted for a 
few days, as the gardener was busy, and so they got dry, &c., 
the result being almost invariably the same as in the case 
of the caterpillars, only more thorough. We are hardly pre- 
pared to suggest exterminatory remedies for the several Fern 
foes just described, especially the last of all, though their 
attacks are particularly insidious, and difficult to evade; we 
can only hope that our little book may convert some of them 
into true Fern-lovers, and, by inculcating a taste for the 
varieties, render the wholesale plunder of the common — but 
still beautiful — forms a thing of the past ; just as no one 
would dream of transplanting wild E/Oses, wild Pansies, &c., 
to his garden, who has become acquainted with their far more 
lovely cultivated sisters. 
