THE RIPENING AUTUMN 
ii 7 
silver, greyest lavender, with a host of other kindred 
hues, crown the high clusters of the Michaelmas Daisy, 
most aerial of autumn flowers; while its antithesis, the 
buxom Dahlia, versatile as ever, now plump and prim 
as an Abigail’s pincushion in pretty Dresden-china 
tints, now aflame, angry and brave, with long twisted 
petal and martial complexion, holds its own as boldly 
as of old in autumns past. Some of its tenderer hues, 
primrose and apricot, blush and fawn and lilac, mingle 
pleasantly with the more freakish blossoms that wear 
the motley of variegated shapes. Single and double, 
Cactus, Pompon, and “ Decorative,” all are gay, all are 
as finely bedizened and tricked out as long-dead City 
matrons of a showier day, when Vauxhall was all the 
rage, and three in the afternoon the modish dinner- 
hour. They are gay, they are respectable, they are 
eminently robust, but, somehow, I cannot love them. 
They stand less dear to me than any flower that blows, 
but that is no reason why I should fail to do them 
justice. 
Never, I believe, until this last month had I come 
to hold the Petunia at its proper value, and now I feel 
that an honourable amend is due, even perhaps some¬ 
thing over-due, because of my comparative insensibility 
of past years. Until lately I had regarded it merely as 
one of the multitudinous harmless unnecessary bedding- 
out plants, and used it in consequence with indifference, 
not all unspiced with a faint flavour of superciliousness. 
But the case is altered now, and it is entirely the 
remote and careless goddess of the unforseen who should 
be thanked. Chance and the gardener did buy for me 
