"Sir," said Sir James, waving his cigar; "I take this roundabout way of approaching that most popular though slightly threadbare subject, the weather; and as I do so I cannot help, in my self-satisfied way, feeling a kind of contemptuous compassion for those who, being agriculturally or horticulturally disposed, go out metaphorically without macintosh, umbrella, or goloshes. It is in this spirit that I feel but small pity for unfortunate Pat who, knowing that Erin is so green on account of its heavy rainfall, will persist in making the staple of his growth the highly satisfactory but tropical potato--that child of the sun which blights and rots and dies away in a humid atmosphere, the consequence of our heavy downpours of rain. `But we must have potatoes,' say both Pat, and John Bull. True: then do as I, Ajax, the weather defier, have done: grow early sorts, which flourish, ripen, and can be housed before the setting in of the heavy autumnal rains." "Hear, hear," said the doctor, sitting back in his wicker chair and holding his fuming cigar in the middle of a peach-tree, where some insects had effected a lodgment. "That's right, doctor, give them a good dose," said Sir James following suit. "But to proceed. It is not _apropos_ of tubers that I indulge this spring in a pleasant warm feeling of self-satisfaction, but on account of wall-fruit--the delicious plum, a bag of golden saccharine pulp, or a violet bloomed, purple-skinned mass of deliciously flavoured amber; the downy-skinned peach, with a ruddy tint like that of a bonny English maiden's cheek; the fiery stoned luscious nectarine--that vinous ambrosial fruit that ought to be eaten with the eyes closed that the soul may dream and be transported into transports of mundane bliss; item, the apricot, that bivalve of fruits which will daintily split into two halves, to enable you to drop the stone before partaking of its juicy joys. Come good season or bad season your Londoner sees the pick of these princes of the fruit world reposing in perfect trim in the market or window; but in such an autumn as the past it was melancholy to walk round one's friends' gardens--say with Tompkins or Smith or Robinson, each of whom spends a little fortune upon his grounds, over which Macduff or Macbeth or Macfarlane, or some other `gairdner fra' the North,' tyrannically presides. The plums upon the most favoured walls were cracked, and dropped spoiled from the trees; the peaches looked white and sickly, and were spotted with decomposition; the nectarines that consented to stay on the twigs were hard and green, and where one that approached the appearance of ripeness was tasted, it was watery, flavourless, and poor." "Watery, flavourless, and poor, is good," said the doctor. "I don't often buy wall-fruit, but if I do spend sixpence in the Central Avenue, Covent Garden, that is about the state of the purchase."