Hood looks over the gate and compliments Mrs. Gardiner, a widow, who has
but one idea, and that is her garden, about which she had the habit of
talking in a singularly figurative style, upon the beauty of her
carnations.
‘Yes, I have a stronger blow than any one in the place, and as to
sweetness, nobody can come nigh me.’
Accepting the polite invitation I stepped in through the little wicket,
and in another moment was rapturously sniffing at her stocks, and the
flower with the sanguinary name. From the walls I turned off to a
rose-bush, remarking that there was a very fine show of buds.
‘Yes, but I want sun to make me bust. You should have seen me last June,
Sir, when I was in my full bloom. None of your wishy-washy pale sorts,
(this was a fling at the white roses at the next door,) none of your
Provincials, or pale pinks. There’s no maiden blushes about me; I’m the
regular old red cabbage.’
And she was right, for after all that hearty, glowing, fragrant rose is
the best of the species; the queen of flowers, with a ruddy
_em-bon-point_, reminding one of the goddesses of Reubens.
‘And there’s my American Creeper. Miss Sharp pretends to creep, but Lor’
bless ye, afore she ever gets up to her first-floor window I shall be
running all over the roof of the willa. You see I’m over the portico
already.’
While this conversation was going on, a deaf bachelor neighbor, who has
a garden of his own, passes by. Mrs. Gardiner hails him in a loud voice,
and addresses him in her customary style.
‘Well, and how are _you_, Mr. Burrel, after them east winds?’
‘Very bad, very bad indeed,’ replied Mr. Burrel, thinking only of his
rheumatics.
‘And so am I,’ said Mrs. Gardiner, remembering nothing but her blight;
‘I’m thinking of trying tobacco-water and a squiringe.’
‘Is that good for it?’ asked Mr. B., with a tone of doubt and surprise.
‘So they say; but you must mix it strong, and squirt it as hard as ever
you can over your affected parts.’
‘What! my lower limbs?’
‘Yes, and your upper ones too. Wherever you are maggoty.’
‘Oh,’ grunted the old gentleman, ‘you mean vermin.’
‘As for me,’ bawled out Mrs. Gardiner, ‘I’m swarming. And Miss Sharp is
wus than I am.’
‘The more’s the pity,’ said the old gentleman, ‘we shall have no apples
and pears.’
‘No, not to signify. How’s your peaches?’
‘Why, they set kindly enough ma’am, but they all dropped off in the last
frosty nights.’
‘Ah, it ain’t the frost,’ roared Mrs. G., ‘you have got down to the
gravel; I know you have, you look so rusty and scrubby.’
‘I wish you good morning, ma’am,’ said the little old bachelor, turning
very red in the face, and making rather a precipitate retreat; as who
wouldn’t, thus attacked at once in his person and his peach trees?
‘To be sure, he was dreadful unproductive,’ the widow said, ‘but a good
sort of body, and ten times pleasanter than the next door neighbor at
number ten, who would keep coming over her wall, till she cut off his
pumpkin.’
She now led me round the house to ‘her back,’ where she showed me her
grass-plot, wishing she was greener, and asking if she ought not to have
a roll. She next led me off to her vegetables, halting at last at her
peas, some few rows of Blue Prussians, which she had probably obtained
from Waterloo, they were so long in coming up.
‘Back’ard, ain’t I?’
‘Yes, rather.’
‘Wery, but Miss Sharp is back’arder than me; she’s hardly out of the
ground yet, and please God, in another fortnight I shall want sticking.’
There was something so irresistibly comic in the last equivoque, that I
was forced to slur over a laugh as a sneeze, and then continued to ask
her if she had no assistance in her labors.
‘What, a gardener? never! I did once have a daily jobber, and he jobbed
away all my dahlias; I declare I could have cried. But’s very hard to
think you’re a valuable bulb, and when summer comes you’re nothing but a
stick and label.’
‘Very provoking, indeed.’
‘Talk of transplanting; they do nothing else but transplant you from one
house to another, till you don’t know where you are. There was I,
thinking I was safe and sound in my own bed, and all the while I was in
Mr. Jones’s. It is scandalous.’
[Illustration: The Canadian Horticulturist]
=VOL. I.]= =SEPTEMBER, 1878.= =[NO. 9.=