But the scheme proved abortive. Goldsmith said, "I think our friend
Abercrombie can write better about plants than I can." And so doubtless
he could, so far as knowledge of their habits went. Eight years after,
Abercrombie prepared a book called "Every Man his own Gardener"; but so
doubtful was he of his own reputation, that he paid twenty pounds to Mr.
Thomas Mawe, the fashionable gardener of the Duke of Leeds, to allow him
to place his name upon the title-page. I am sorry to record such a
scurvy bit of hypocrisy in so competent a man. The book sold, however,
and sold so well, that, a few years after, the elegant Mr. Mawe begged a
visit from the nurseryman of Tottenham Court, whom he had never seen; so
Abercrombie goes down to the seat of the Duke of Leeds, and finds his
gardener so bedizened with powder, and wearing such a grand air, that he
mistakes him for his Lordship; but it is a mistake, we may readily
believe, which the elegant Mr. Mawe forgives, and the two gardeners
become capital friends.

Abercrombie afterward published many works under his own name;[B] among
these was "The Gardener's Pocket Journal," which maintained an
unflagging popularity as a standard book for a period of half a century.
This hardy Scotchman lived to be eighty; and when he could work no
longer, he was constantly afoot among the botanical gardens about
London. At the last it was a fall "down-stairs in the dark" that was the
cause of death; and fifteen days after, as his quaint biographers tell
us, "he expired, just as the clock upon St. Paul's struck
twelve,--between April and May": as if the ripe old gardener could not
tell which of these twin garden-months he loved the best; and so, with a
foot planted in each, he made the leap into the realm of eternal spring.

A noticeable fact in regard to this out-of-door old gentleman is, that
he never took "doctors'-stuff" in his life, until the time of that fatal