It was in the "Jack"-house that I one morning found Thomas Devoy, the gardener, at work with his great oddly-shaped shears or scissors, and detained him long enough to make a little sketch of him among his flowers; and while I worked with pencils and paper he told me divers anecdotes of the twenty-eight years he had spent in Professor Morse's service. "I entered service in the old country when I was very young," he said; "and even as a little boy I was fond of gardening. One time, when I was a child, I was going through some splendid greenhouses with the head-gardener who took care of them. There was one very rare plant of which he was exceedingly proud, and I begged him for a tiny slip to take home with me. But he refused; and so, in passing by, I quietly broke off one little leaf. Some time afterward I was able to show him a plant as fine as his own which I had raised from that one leaf, and then I told him its story." All the fine, large Jacqueminots in the "Jack"-house were raised from one parent plant with cuttings made about four years or so before, the gardener told me, while I, gazing in amazement at their high-reaching branches, thought, with "Topsy," it was something to boast of that they had "jest growed." In the winter the rose-houses become things of beauty and a joy forever, seeming to have imprisoned the very heart of summer within their walls, while outside--shut away from the warmth and glowing tints of red and pink, yellow and lustrous rosy pearl--lie the snow and the ice, and through the bare branches of the trees the wind whistles drearily. But in the summer the aspect of the rose-houses is very different. All then is preparation and making over for the coming autumn and winter. Some of the houses are planted with tiny cuttings just lifting little tender sprays above the warm, moist soil. Men are at work here and there with hammers and nails, repairing any slight damage that may have been done in previous months. Hose-pipes coil over the floors, and one must walk by them daintily. In other houses one would exclaim with pleasure at finding one's self in a wilderness of roses, pink, yellow, and white, only to be told, rather contemptuously, "_That_ is nothing. There are no roses here now. You must wait till winter if you want something worth seeing. We have roses as large as tea-saucers then, and any quantity of them."