count, 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.

[Illustration: MY ROSES ARE SCATTERED HERE, THERE, AND
EVERYWHERE.]

But this is the time and hour that one gardener, on a very modest scale,
may be excused if she overrates the charms of rose possessing, for it is
a June morning, both bright and overcast by turns. A wood thrush is
practising his arpegios in the little cedar copse on one side, and a
catbird is hurling every sort of vocal challenge and bedevilment from
his ancestral syringa bush on the other, and all between is a gap filled
with a vista of rose-bushes--not marshalled in a garden together, but
scattered here, there, and everywhere that a good exposure and deep
foothold could be found.

As far as the arrangement of my roses is concerned, "do as I say, not as
I do" is a most convenient motto. I have tried to formalize my roses
these ten years past, but how can I, for my yellow brier (Harrison's)
has followed its own sweet will so long that it makes almost a hedge.
The Madame Plantiers of mother's garden are stalwart shrubs, like many
other nameless bushes collected from old gardens hereabout, one
declining so persistently to be uprooted from a particularly cheerful
corner that it finds itself in the modern company of Japanese iris, and
inadvertently sheds its petals to make rose-water of the birds' bath.

An English sweetbrier of delicious leafage hobnobs with honeysuckle and
clematis on one of the wren arbours, while a great nameless bush of
exquisite blush buds, quite destitute of thorns (one of the many
cuttings sent "the Doctor's wife" in the long ago), stands an
unconscious chaperone between Marshall P. Wilder and Mrs. John Lang.

I must at once confess that it is much better to keep the roses apart in
long borders of a kind than to scatter them at random. By so doing the
plants can be easily reached from either side, more care being taken not
to overshadow the dwarf varieties by the more vigorous.

Lavinia Cortright has left the old-fashioned June roses that belonged to
her garden where they were, but is now gathering the new hybrids after
the manner of Evan's little plan. In this way, without venturing