bloom, the heads of each being more than
four feet through. The successful cultivators
would inform you that no great amount of
skill was necessary in order to bring the
rose into this state. It is perfectly hardy,
scrambling over old walls, but it, requires a
rich soil and plenty of room to grow. The
Chinese say that night-soil is one of the best
manures to give it. Only fancy a wall
completely covered with many hundred flowers,
of various hues — yellowish, salmon, and
bronze-like, and then say what rose we have
in the gardens of this country so striking;
and how great would have been the pity if an
introduction of this kind had been lost
through the blighting influence of such
ignorance and prejudice, as have been shown by
the person to whose care it was first
intrusted.'' I heave eased my mind by speaking
a word in favour of ill-used, mismanaged
roses. I will now mention a woeful blank
which some enterprising rose-raiser ought
to fill forthwith ; we sadly want a thoroughly
double Austrian briar, with the petals orange-
scarlet above and yellow beneath. The
desideratum only bides its time.

As to gathering roses; — when you wish to
offer to your affianced love something as
charming and fresh as herself, avoid making
the attempt in windy weather. If a gentle
shower will not come to your aid, water
liberally all day long. Next morning, at
three o'clock, or a little before, turn out of
bed, and cut the choicest specimens, — none
of them more than three-quarters opened,
—before the sun has had time to kiss the
dew off their leaves. Arrange according to
your own, and your Dulcinea's fancy, and tie
with a true-lover's knot of blue satin
ribbon. When done, put the bouquet, or
bouquets, in water, in a cool unoccupied room,
with the blinds drawn down, till the
moment arrives for the roses to appear in the
divinity's presence.

Every one is acquainted with the French
fashion of decorating graves with flowers.
The way in which those flowers are
generally respected, is an equally well-known
fact. But everybody does not know the
severity with which any violations of the
little grave-gardens are punished. The
Moniteur for September the twenty-second,
eighteen hundred and fifty-two, states in its
police report, that a woman named Badé,
employed to keep up the flowers on a
certain tomb in the Cimetière du Sud,
conceived a singular method of fulfilling, without
cost to herself, her office, which was
liberally recompensed. Two handsome rose-
trees, which overshadowed this tomb, withered
and died. Shall she go and buy others to
replace them? By no means. She remembers
that, on another grave some distance off, there
are growing two magnificent plants of the
same species. She takes them up; steals
them ; and employs them to adorn the grave
which is entrusted to her care. The guardian
of the Cemetery had already noticed a similar
abstraction on the part of that bad woman.
A complaint is made, and she gets for her
pains — a year's imprisonment ! Better law
this, I think, than we usually get at home.
Dear reader, I write as one — may you not
read as one ! — who has put Roses on the
graves of the beloved.

TWO DINNER FAILURES.

THOUGH Christmas comes but once a-year,
and dinner comes — or ought to come — once
a-day, three hundred and sixty-five times, in
the year's course, I doubt if any number of
extra banquets, at other times, could
compensate for the loss of a dinner on Christmas
day. I am qualified to speak on the subject,
for I have gone two Christmases dinnerless.
There might be, perhaps, some usefuller and
more efficacious method of celebrating the
great anniversary, than by devouring
certain stated and set-apart meats and
condiments, whose consumption is almost
invariably followed by indigestion amongst the
younger branches, and the indulgence in
which frequently compels the strongest-stomached
and bravest in gastric functions of us
all to unloose the ultimate button of our waistcoats;
yet if there be any observances on
earth defensible — any festivities in the world
excusable on the ground that they are
not enjoyed in secret, in solitude, or in
selfishness, that they are imparted, that
they bring old acquaintance together, that
they draw tighter the bonds of friendship,
and staunch the wounds of enmity,
that they are the delight of the young and
the solace of the aged, that they promote
good-fellowship, peace, and good-will among
all men — these Christmas merry-makings
are things that will live and will smell sweet
to posterity to the latest time.

I like leaves in summer, and the glittering
frost and whitewashing of Nature's outbuildings
in winter; but from muggy weather in
January, and snow in July, good sense
deliver me! So, by a parity of feeling, do I
look evilly upon a man who orders
plum-pudding after his joint at an eating-house in
the middle of the year; so did I once quarrel
with a dear friend because he gave me roast
sucking-pig (at other times a celestial dish)
for dinner on Christmas Day. There is a
reason in roasting eggs; there should be a
wise discrimination in the time and place of
eating traditionally festive dishes. Pudding
can be out of season as well as oysters. You
would not roast cockles at a vestry-room
fire. You would not singe a goose with
Tennyson's poems. You would not bid a
convict condemned to die on Boxing Day, twine
holly round the bars of his cell on the twenty-fifth
of December. I will go farther than
this. I cannot help thinking that a man who
eats wrong dishes at Christmas time, or