Jubilee Park was sacred to those who thronged the close-packed southern and eastern areas of the city. Among many other things, held by the people of Blackhampton to be vastly more important, the town and its suburbs had a reputation for flowers. It was odd that it should have. Except perhaps a subtle quality in the soil, there was little in its corporate life or in its physical expression to account for the fact that it had long been famous for its roses. Among the hundreds of allotment holders on the outskirts of the city, practical rose growers abounded and these claimed an apotheosis at the annual show in Jubilee Park. Almost the only vanity Mr. Josiah Munt had permitted himself in his earlier days was that he was a practical rose grower. He had competed at the show ever since there had been a show, and he had garnered so many prizes in the process that he now took rank as an expert. But he was more than that. He was now regarded as chief patron of a cult that was largely confined to the humbler and the poorer classes. A hard man, known throughout the city as very "near" in his business dealings, he was a despiser of public opinion and no seeker of popular applause. But of late years, having grown remarkably prosperous and a figure of ever-increasing consequence in the town, he made a practice just once in the year of "letting himself out a bit" at the function in Jubilee Park. For one thing the Park itself was almost within a stone's throw of the Duke of Wellington; and in Josiah's opinion its sole merit was its contiguity to that famous public house. Personally he despised Jubilee Park and the class of persons who frequented it--they were a common lot--but now he had taken rank as the great man of this particular neighborhood, wherein he had been born and had sown the seeds of his fortune, it did him no harm in his own esteem or in that of the people who had known him in humbler days, once a year to savor his preëminence. Tuesday, August the Fourth, was one of the hottest days within the memory of Blackhampton. And in that low-lying, over-populated area of which Jubilee Park was the center it seemed hotter than anywhere else. Being the day after Bank Holiday, a large section of the community "had taken another day off," therefore several thousand persons of all ages and both sexes assembled on the brown bare grass in the course of the afternoon.