I told her plainly, in so many words, what the trouble was. I took due blame on myself (and I am sure she has never forgiven me) and did my best to point out in a calm, rational, scientific manner that what had happened was the result of purely natural causes operating in a perfectly logical way. Her face never unfroze, her eyes never as much as glinted, and I don't know to this day whether she did what she did because she wanted to or because she thought it was her Christian duty. As I say, she heard me out without turning a hair. It was only when a sudden flash of inspiration came to me at the very end, as I was halfway out the door, that I thought I saw a bit of a twist on her prim lips. I remembered then that my uncle had had a very fine, large bull, and I told her so. What happened that night, was in a sense, tragic. The bull got loose, as it had done before. It rooted and rampaged down the length of Spring Street, breaking through the Sutherland's new hedge, plowing up the Pitkins' dahlia beds, scaring a grey mare and spilling out two spooners in a buggy, chasing Constable Nate Williams up a lamp-post, and topping off the evening by raging through Melchizedek Hobbs' greenhouse from end to end. By the time a posse had ramped through after it, and been chased by it, and hosts of small boys and frantic dogs had followed them and fled before them, the species Zulu rose was extinct in the Western Hemisphere. I say extinct. Melchizedek Hobbs had come out in his crazy smock to drive the beast off, and it treed him. It tore the robe off him and trampled it to ruin. I know, for I was the one who got him down out of the tree when they had cornered the bull. The old plant was left, and I have always had to give credit to Abigail, much as I sometimes dislike her, because she let him keep it after they were married, up to the point where it began to shed on her rugs. No woman could do more. He killed it then, quietly. And to this day, though Melchizedek Hobbs still potters around the greenhouses and sits in the back of the new store when Abigail will let him, he has never so much as mentioned the Zulu rose nor his ill-fated attempt to teach young plants the facts of life.