THE LADIES’ FLORAL CABINET. 
311 
vigorous La France, a result I half suspected from her pe¬ 
culiar habit, even before blooming. Auguste Mie mani¬ 
fested lofty aspirations in styling himself Climbing Jules 
Margottin, a pretension his sprawling, prostrate habit 
failed to corroborate. Prince Camille de Rohan, of 
kingly lineage, by some inexplicable freak, contrary to 
all evolutionary precedents, degenerated into the plain 
plebeian, Paul Ricant. A little later on I found that 
an insignificant Hybrid Noisette had had the vault¬ 
ing ambition to assume the royal role of Queen of 
Queens, whose ample charms and regal bearing were 
ludicrously represented by the puny, faded-out impostor. 
But the impertinent versatility of Antoinette Strozzio 
went beyond all bounds, for she pertly attempted to pass 
off her meagre charms for those of half a dozen veritable 
court beauties, not to mention the unpardonable indeli¬ 
cacy of donning male attire, and aggravating that impro¬ 
priety by galivanting round as E. Y. Teas, a highly re¬ 
spectable gentleman, who in his capacity as a rose is also 
refined and elegant, and has carried off the highest 
honors at scores of foreign rose shows; honors which no 
doubt are fully equalled by the respect he has won in the 
more material state of his dual existence. At all events 
it is only just that he should be duly warned of the com¬ 
promising manoeuvres of the artful Antoinette. Achille 
Gounod, with irreverent effrontery, assumed to be in holy 
orders, and in the stolen cassock of the Rev. J. B. Camm 
proved to be that saddest of all libels on humanity, a 
clerical fraud. 
But to record in detail each disenchanting metamor¬ 
phosis would occupy too much space; suffice it to say 
that more than one half of the consignment turned out 
arrant humbugs, while two of the plants gave up the 
ghost before showing their colors, no doubt from a 
morbid fear of the ignominy of ultimate detection, or 
perhaps they had the redeeming grace to die of remorse 
of conscience. I discovered, by taking away the earth, 
that another whose foliage had begun to wilt and turn 
to a sickly yellow, had been overtaken by Nemesis, in 
the shape of a white grub, which had remorselessly eaten 
away all its roots, thus bringing its career of duplicity to 
an untimely close. I had dealt with the florist who fur¬ 
nished me with this masquerade of the roses for years 
and had found him trustworthy and liberal, and my pre¬ 
vious orders had usually been filled with care and accu¬ 
racy. Consequently, I came to the conclusion that this 
particular lot had been made up by some heedless and 
incompetent assistant, who would probably have repliec 
to any remonstrance as to the intricate confusion of 
identity in the roses as satisfactorily as did the'old show¬ 
man in Punch, who, when requested by a] verdant 
patron to point out “ which wax figger is the Duke of 
Wellington and which is Napoleon,” replied^with bland 
suavity, “ You pays your money and you takes your 
choice.” 
It is all in vain that flippant florists quote Shakespeare 
in justification of their crooked tricks, involuntary 'or 
otherwise, “ What’s in a name, &c.! ” Let some cour¬ 
ageous florist suggest to Miss Rose Cleveland the fitness 
and altruistic (or whatever it is) propriety of styling her¬ 
self “ Dorcas Mehitable Cleveland.” The result of such 
temerity would, in all probability, be that the Bard of 
Avon would evermore cease to be an authority for that 
particular florist (not to mention the mark of the broom¬ 
stick). No, no, a rose decked with a fraudulent name 
does not, by any means, smell as sweet. 
But now the damaging testimony is to come. Of 
course I was surprised and indignant at the result, and 
wrote to the florist, giving him an unvarnished account 
of the unsatisfactory shipment. He replied, expressing 
great regret at my discomfiture, and offered to make 
amends another season for the glaring confusion in which 
my order reached me. He explained that in forming his 
collection of Hybrid Remontants from which to propagate 
he had obtained the stock plants from the various lead¬ 
ing dealers in roses, and believing them to be correctly 
named had sent them out to his customers in good faith, 
carefully labeled as he had received them. 
I have no reason to question his statement, for I be¬ 
lieve him to be an honorable man, and, although my 
wrongs were aggravated by the fact that he replied by a 
type-writer (I cordially hate type-written letters ; the en¬ 
tire get-up, not excepting the ideas, has a mechanical 
turn), I accepted his explanation. In conclusion, I think 
I may be permitted to say that this incident proves pretty 
clearly that the abuse complained of is a general one, and 
that the Society of American Florists can earn lasting 
honor by making straight the crooked paths by which 
an important minority of American florists attempt to 
find the way that leads to fortune. F. Lance. 
SEEDLING CHRYSANTHEMUMS. 
T HE seed was the choicest American, raised and 
saved from the finest hand-fertilized flowers by John 
Thorpe. The packet was a small one, but I raised from 
it 114 plants, all of which have grown and flowered. 
Sowing. —I sowed the seed last March, in light soil in 
a flat (seed-pan), and placed it in a warm greenhouse. In 
from seven to eleven days the seedlings appeared, and in 
a few days more I pricked them off into other flats and 
still kept them in the greenhouse. When they grew 
enough to begin to crowd each other in the flat, I trans¬ 
planted them two to three inches apart into shallow 
boxes filled with rich soil and placed them in a cold 
frame till planting-out time, toward the end of May. I 
think every seed must have germinated. 
Summer Care. —-They were planted in very sandy 
but highly manured land, in rows a yard apart each way. 
From the first they grew away kindly and never halted 
in their growth till flowering time. I mulched over their 
roots with rotted manure, and as the summer advanced 
and drouth began to be felt I made basin-shaped hollows 
