earthen pots for plants great and small, and
many other utensils such as those unlearned in gardening lore would
consider uncouth in the extreme. On one side of the room stands the big
table upon which the baskets are set, and above this are ranged numerous
rows of shelves. Four doors open into the rose-houses, and at the east
end is the one devoted exclusively to the culture of Jacqueminots,--the
"Jack"-house it is irreverently, if not slangily, styled. Here the glass
roof stands open all the summer long, for the breezes to blow and the
soft rains to fall upon the petted plants; and here the sunshine holds
high revel, bronzing the intricate tracery of stem and branch and
turning half the leaves to shining emeralds.

It was in the "Jack"-house that I one morning found Thomas Devoy, the
gardener, at work with his great oddly-shaped shears or scissors, and
detained him long enough to make a little sketch of him among his
flowers; and while I worked with pencils and paper he told me divers
anecdotes of the twenty-eight years he had spent in Professor Morse's
service. "I entered service in the old country when I was very young,"
he said; "and even as a little boy I was fond of gardening. One time,
when I was a child, I was going through some splendid greenhouses with
the head-gardener who took care of them. There was one very rare plant
of which he was exceedingly proud, and I begged him for a tiny slip to
take home with me. But he refused; and so, in passing by, I quietly
broke off one little leaf. Some time afterward I was able to show him a
plant as fine as his own which I had raised from that one leaf, and then
I told him its story."

All the fine, large Jacqueminots in the "Jack"-house were raised from
one parent plant with cuttings made about four years or so before, the
gardener told me, while I, gazing in amazement at their high-reaching
branches, thought, with "Topsy," it was something to boast of that they
had "jest growed."

In the winter the rose-houses become things of beauty and a joy forever,
seeming to have imprisoned the very heart of summer within their walls,
while outside--shut away from the warmth and glowing tints of red and
pink, yellow and lustrous rosy pearl--lie the snow and the ice, and
through the bare branches of the trees the wind whistles drearily.

But in the summer the aspect of the rose-houses is very different. All
then is preparation and making over for the coming autumn and winter.
S