SUMMER’S LEASE 
7 1 
clustered bouquets of rosy lilac, white, and rose; some 
are living rubies with the sun shining through, others 
like a shower of pearls flung abroad upon the spray. 
And if you look lower, you will find here the fragrant 
Maiden’s Blush, indefensible of contour, but most 
delicate in perfume and of hue; the old Damask rose, 
nearly single, with its golden heart; and those fantastic 
red and white freaked roses whose capricious broideries 
resemble one another so nearly ; the York and Lancaster, 
Rosa Mundi, and the French Village Maid. It seems a 
pity that these last are such unprofitable flowers for 
plucking; they would make charming breast-knots, or 
crown delightfully the Lowestoft bowl were they not 
over-ephemeral of habit for either office. The leafy 
group of Boursault bushes surrounding the little mock- 
Attic summer-house that simulates a shrine, I cherish 
almost entirely for the sake of the perennially green and 
constant foliage with its velvet texture and delicately 
indented veins. I care but little for the flowers, they 
show too marked a suggestion of magenta to please me ; 
yet they look well enough half lost amid their full, soft 
leafage, and their loose petals hold a strange sweet 
aroma, peculiarly their own, that ensures for them the 
honour of a fragrant entombment in the rose jar. There 
is a high thick hedge of Boursaults in the orchard, too, 
and it is here that I come for foliage when I have need 
of it. 
This first summer month that brings the rose has 
brought an unaccustomed wealth of bloom to that little- 
known and half-forgotten masterpiece, my Lamarque, 
of whose possession I am, perhaps, not unjustly vain. 
