friends, or the song of familiar birds, is the perfume of flowers to
those who live with them, and among roses none impress this
characteristic more poignantly than the crimson Jacqueminot and the
silver-pink La France, equally delicious and absolutely different.

As one who has learned by long and sometimes disastrous experience, to
one who is now really plunging headlong into the sea of garden
mysteries and undercurrents for the first time, I give you warning! if
you have a real rose garden, or, merely what Lavinia Cortright calls
hers, a rosary of assorted beads, try as far as possible to have all
your seed sowing and transplanting done before the June rose season
begins, that you may give yourself up to this one flower, heart, soul,
yes, and body also! It was no haphazard symbolist that, in troubadour
days, gave Love the rose for his own flower, for to be its real self the
rose demands all and must be all in all to its possessor.

As for you, Mary Penrose, who eschewed hen-keeping as a deceitful
masquerade of labour, under the name of rural employment, ponder deeply
before you have spade put to turf in your south lawn, and invest your
birthday dollars in the list of roses that at this very moment I am
preparing to send you, with all possible allurement of description to
egg you on. For unless you have very poor luck, which the slope of your
land, depth of soil, and your own pertinacity and staying qualities
discount, many more dollars in quarters, halves, or entire will follow
the first large outlay, and I may even hear of your substituting the
perpetual breakfast prune of boarding-houses for your grapefruit in
winter, or being overcome in summer by the prevailing health-food
epidemic, in order that you may plunder the housekeeping purse
successfully.