Burbidge laid the bunch of roses close beside me, for they had slipped off the sofa whilst he was talking. Before going, he vouchsafed the information that there be a Reine d'Angleterre three parts in blow. He pronounced the French words strangely, but I understood from many talks what was meant in Gallic, and that he would bring it to me. "And 'tis a great deal, I think, the sight of a new rose--leastways, 'tis to me; for it allus pleases, and it never can be uncivil like many Christians," he said. After which profound dictum, my good old gardener hobbled off. These kind gifts and little attentions touched me. I appreciated much Auguste's thoughtful kindness, and Burbidge's pity for my misfortune, for it was his invariable rule that a "first blow," must show itself first in a garden. "Don't 'e interfere with the Lord's system," he once said to me, when I wanted to gather a new tree peony. "Let it pleasure itself first time in the garden, and arter yer may please yerself." I smelt my bunch of roses, the fragrance was delicious, soft and sweet, and only to be fully appreciated by dipping one's nose well into the centre of the sweetest. Certainly a rose is a lovely flower, and it is wonderful what gardeners have done to tend, improve, and develop it, and it was hard to imagine that any of the great double complex blossoms that I held in my hand, were first cousin, and lineally descended from the wild rose of the hedges. Yet delicious as roses are, and beloved by most men, and women, there have been, and may be, for aught I know, some who still cordially hate them, as cordially as Lord Roberts is said to dislike the presence of a cat, or a certain Duchess that I have been told of, the approach of horses. Marguerite of Navarre, the wife of Henry IV. of France, is said to have found the perfume of roses so repellent, that she fainted if one was brought her; and I remember in Evelyn's Diary of 1670, an account of a dinner-party at Goring House, in which he tells us that, "Lord Stafford rose from table in some disorder, because there were roses stuck about the fruit at dessert." Sir Kenelm Digby also told a story of the same kind of Lady Selenger (St. Leger). Her antipathy to this flower he declared to have been so great, that some one laying a rose beside her cheek when asleep, thereby caused a blister to rise. Whether the story was true it is too long ago to tell; but by all accounts Sir Kenelm "was a teller of strange things." Whilst I was thinking over these old-world stories, I was suddenly interrupted by the entrance of my little girl. "Oh, mamma," cried Bess, with tears in her eyes, "only to think he--Hals--has to go, to go in two days." "Do not cry, little one," I replied. "Papa and I have settled that I am to go off for a week to the seaside, and you shall come too; and even Mouse shall have her ticket."