county. From my heart I pity that gardener. They might as well have brought him Bob's hack, and told him that if he could not win the Derby and the St Leger with him, they really must find somebody who could. He is not even allowed to choose a situation. The tall ones are to be planted on each side of the broad walk, and the little ones opposite the boudoir window. The broad walk may be as bleak as a common, or, under the shade of melancholy boughs, as dank as a mausoleum; and the dear little bed opposite the boudoir never sees the sun until mid-day, when it is grilled for three mortal hours, and then given back to gloom. So there the poor Rose-trees standthrough the winter, ludibrium ventis, or without any air at all, and in the spring a rialto, rendezvous, common room, and tap for all the riff-raff of the insect world—an infirmary for all the diseases which the neglected Rose is heir to. Some few, perhaps, may brave all, and bloom; but they no more resemble the glorious flowers which my lady saw at Kensington or the Crystal Palace, than my little boy's toy railway-train resembles the Scotch express.

In my next chapter I will tell what may be done in at very small garden, by a very poor man, who really loves the Rose.

CHAPTER II.

CAUSES OF SUCCESS.

FROM the lukewarm to the earnest, from failure to success. Ten years ago, one cold slate-coloured morning towards the end of March ("hunch-weather," as I have heard it termed in Lincolnshire, because, I suppose, a sense of starvation has a tendency to set one's back up), I received a note from a Nottingham mechanic, inviting me to assist in a judicial capacity at an exhibition of Roses, given by working men, which was to be held on Easter Monday. Not having at the time a Rose in my possession, although, to my shame be it spoken, I had ample room and appliances, and knowing, moreover, that all the conservatories of the neighbourhood were in a like destitute and disgraceful condition, it never occurred to me that the tiny glass houses, which I had seen so often on the hills near Nottingham, could be more honourably utilised or worthily occupied, and I threw

down the letter on my first impulse as a hoax, and a very poor one. Hoaxes, I have observed, are not what they used to be when I took an active part in them; and, moreover, the proximity of the 1st of April made me more than ordinarily suspicious. Nevertheless, upon a second inspection, I was so impressed by a look and tone of genuine reality that I wrote ultimately to the address indicated, asking, somewhat sarcastically and incredulously, as being a shrewd superior person not to be sold at any figure, what sorts of Roses were so kind as to bloom during the month of April at Nottingham, and nowhere else. By return of post I was informed, with much more courtesy than I had any claim to, that the Roses in question were grown under glass-where and how, the growers would be delighted to show me, if I would oblige them by my company.

On Easter Monday, in due course, upon a raw and gusty day, when spring and winter, sleet and sunshine, were fighting round after round, like Spring and Langan, for victory,— winter now retreating, sobbing and puffing, to his corner, and now coming on in force, black with rage, resistless, hitting out hard and straight, until the sun's eye had a sickly glare, and the cold world trembled in his cruel hug and grip-I went to Nottingham. Again, as the hail beat

upon the window of the rail conveyance, a horrible dread of imposition vexed my unquiet soul, and I was so cowardly as to give an evasive answer (our vulgar forefathers used to call it lying) when a friend among my fellow-passengers inquired the purport of my journey. Nor were my silly suspicions expelled until my hansom from the station stopped before the General Cathcart Inn, and the landlord met me, with a smile on his face and with a Senateur Vaisse in his coat, which glowed amid the gloom like the red light on a midnight train, and (in my eyes, at any rate) made summer of that damp and dismal day. Within his portals I found a crowd of other exhibitors, some with Roses in their coats like himself, and some without, for the valid reason, that they were there in their shirt-sleeves, with no coats at all, just as you would see them at their daily work, and some of them only spared from it to cut and stage their flowers. These welcomed me with outstretched hands, and seemed amused when, on their apologising for their soiled appearance, I assured them of my vivid affection for all kinds of floricultural dirt, and that I counted no man worthy of the name of gardener whose skin was always white and clean. No, a rich, glowing, gipsy brown is that one touch from Nature's paint - brush, which makes the whole world of

florists kin, which is seen beneath the battered billycock and the hat of shining silk, and which, whether the japanned ones get their garments from Poole or pawnbroker, whether they be clad in double-milled or fustian, whether they own a castle or rent an attic, unites them, heart and hand.

"Who shall judge a man from manners?
Who shall know him from his dress?

Paupers may be fit for princes,

Princes fit for something less.

Crumpled shirt and dirty jacket

May beclothe the golden ore

Of the humblest thoughts and feelings

What can satin vest do more?"

"The Roses were ready: would I go up-stairs?" And up-stairs, accordingly, with my co-censor, a nurseryman and skilled Rosarian of the neighbourhood, I mounted, and entered one of those long narrow rooms in which marketordinaries are wont to be held, wherein the Odd-Fellows, the Foresters, and the Druids meet in mysterious conclave, and where during the race-week and the pleasure-fair there is a sound of the viol and the mazy dance. What a contrast now! The chamber, whose normal purpose was clamour and chorus from crowded men, we found empty, hushed, and still; the air, on other public occasions hot with cooked

B