T H K RO S E 0F MAY 
f>5 
bleached by long exposure to wind and weather;—there seemed no 
life within or about it. Every trace of furniture and wainscot was 
gone from its interior, and its principal rooms were the depositories 
of old ploughs and disused ladders; yet still its roof, floors and 
windows were in decent repair. It had once upon a time been a 
well conditioned house; had been moated, and its garden-wall had 
been terminated by stately stone pillars surmounted by well-cut 
urns, one of which, at the time we were there, lay overgrown with 
grass in the ground beneath; the other, after a similar fall, had 
been replaced, but with the wrong end uppermost. To add still 
more to its lonesomeness, thick, wild woods encompassed it on three 
sides, whence, of an evening, and often too in the course of the day, 
came the voices of owls and other gloomy wood-creatures. 
“ There’s not a flower in the garden,”—said a woman who, with 
her husband and child, we found to our astonishment, inhabiting 
what had once been the scullery,—“ not a flower but Feverfew and 
the Rose of May, and you’ll not think it worth getting.” She was 
mistaken ; I was delighted to find this sweet and favourite Rose in 
so ruinous a situation. 
Again, we found it in the gardens of Annesley Hall, that most 
poetical of old mansions ; and the ancient housekeeper, at that time 
its sole inhabitant, pointed out this flower with a particular empha¬ 
sis. “ And here’s the Rose of May,” said she, drawing out a slender 
spray from a tangle of Jessamine that hung about the stone-work 
of the terrace ; “ a main pretty thing, though there’s little store set 
by it now-a-davs.” 
