and what rare; when a flower is rare, and when ordinary--the
gardener presently talks to you as to a man of art, tells you that you
are a lover of art, a friend to a florist, shows you his exotics, his
green-house, and his stores; what he has set out, and what he has budded
or enarched, and the like; but if he finds you have none of the terms
of art, know little or nothing of the names of plants, or the nature of
planting, he picks your pocket instantly, shows you a fine trimmed
fuz-bush for a juniper, sells you common pinks for painted ladies, an
ordinary tulip for a rarity, and the like. Thus I saw a gardener sell a
gentleman a large yellow auricula, that is to say, a _running away_, for
a curious flower, and take a great price. It seems, the gentleman was a
lover of a good yellow; and it is known, that when nature in the
auricula is exhausted, and has spent her strengh in showing a fine
flower, perhaps some years upon the same root, she faints at last, and
then turns into a yellow, which yellow shall be bright and pleasant the
first year, and look very well to one that knows nothing of it, though
another year it turns pale, and at length almost white. This the
gardeners call a _run flower_, and this they put upon the gentleman for
a rarity, only because he discovered at his coming that he knew nothing
of the matter. The same gardener sold another person a root of white
painted thyme for the right _Marum Syriacum;_ and thus they do every
day.

A person goes into a brickmaker's field to view his clamp, and buy a
load of bricks; he resolves to see them loaded, because he would have
good ones; but not understanding the goods, and seeing the workmen
loading them where they were hard and well burnt, but looked white and
grey, which, to be sure, were the best of the bricks, and which perhaps
they would not have done if he had not been there to look at them, they
supposing he understood which were the best; but he, in the abundance of
his ignorance, finds fault with them, because they were not a good
colour, and did not look red; the brickmaker's men took the hint
immediately, and telling the buyer they would give him red bricks to
oblige him, turned their hands from the grey hard well-burnt bricks to
the soft _sammel_[9] half-burnt bricks, which they were glad to dispose
of, and which nobody that had understood them would have taken off their
hands.

I mention these lower things, because I would suit my writing to the
un