So, as I said before, I made up my mind, not to go making a stupid of myself any longer, playing at market-gardening, and turning myself into a manufacturing green-grocer and fruiterer, by trying to convert a trumpery band-box full of mould and gravel into a productive orchard. Accordingly I determined to root up the whole of those rat-tailed stalks of cabbages, and have the place nicely turfed in the centre, and a few pretty rose-bushes, and geranium trees, and other odd things, that at any rate would be pleasant to one’s eye and nose, put round the sides. Consequently I had up Mr. Dick Farden, and asked him whether he thought he could manage _that_ for me without spoiling it; but really the fellow was so conceited, and fancied himself so clever, that, of course, he was as confident he could do it for me as he was that he could move my piano--(and a pretty mess he made of that--as the reader knows!) He couldn’t, however, merely give a simple answer to a simple question, and have done with it, but must go on talking his head off, and speaking to me as familiarly as if I was one of his pot-companions, saying that it was very easy to lay the ground out, but he was afraid I should find it quite as hard to raise a nosegay as a salad “in the first city of the world.” For, in all in his experience, he had noticed that Cockney roses were not to be forced beyond the size of grog-blossoms, and he would defy even Mr. Paxton himself to get London tulips any bigger than thimbles. He said that the beautiful climate of Brompton itself, which all the house-agents and physicians cried up as the Devonshire district of London, would only produce hollyhocks in the flower line, and mustard and cress in the vegetable ditto,--and from all he had seen in his time, he had come to the conclusion, that trying to get roses and lilies, this side of Richmond, was really the pursuit of flowers under difficulties; for it appeared to be as if Providence had originally designed that the soil of London should bear nothing beyond bricks and mortar. Though it was not so much the fault of the ground as it was of the cats--and them he could not, for the life of him, help looking upon as the young gardener’s worst companion--for as fast you put in the seed, just as fast would they scratch it up again; and, of course, nothing would satisfy the creatures but they must go lying in your beds of a night. Indeed, the Toms of London seemed, like young Love always to prefer sleeping among the roses. Now, he remembered, he told me, about the time when Walworth went mad about dahlias, and offered a prize of a hundred guineas for the finest specimen that could be grown within two miles of the Elephant and Castle,--he was sure any one might have heard the amateur gardeners firing at the cats, and the guns going off there of a night, for all the world like a review in Hyde-park; but all to no good--for, after all, the prize was carried off by a clever young