And to think how those prickly canes, denuded of their leaves, are sold upon our city thoroughfares as “Spanish rose-trees” to the unsuspecting passer-by! Those guileless venders, too! I remember one that sought to enrich my store of botanical knowledge by telling me they “bloomed in winter!” and had a flower as “big as a saucer,” and “kinder like a holy hawk!!!?” I looked him straight in the eye, but he was the picture of innocence. “Can you tell me the botanical name,” I asked. “Oh yes,” he glibly replied, “I think they call it the _Rubus epistaxis_.” Eheu! but this was _too much_, and he saw it, and with a wink of his foxy eye and a shrewd grin, he whispered along the palm of his hand, “Got to git a livin’ _somehow_, boss; now _don’t_ give me away.” “Here you are, lady, Spanish roses, lady, fresh from the steamer.” I never see a thicket of green-brier without thinking of its “winter blossom;” and, by-the-way, did you ever notice a thicket of this shrub, what a defiant, arbitrary tyrant it is--shutting out the very life-breath and light of day from its encumbered victims, monopolizing everything within its power, and even reaching out for more with searching tips in mid-air, and a couple of greedy tendrils at every leaf? And did you ever notice along the road that delicious whiff that comes to you every now and then, that pungent breath of the sweet-fern? We get it now; the air is laden with it from the dark-green beds across the road. The sweet-fern, as I remember it, was the simpler’s panacea and the small boy’s joy--an aromatic shrub, whose inhaled fumes, together with its corn-silk rival, seem destined by an all-wise Providence as a preparatory tonic to the more ambitious fumigation of after-years. Many a time have I sat upon this bank and tried to imagine in my domestic product the racy flavor of the famed Havana!