I once asked
a village maiden why the people made firewood of carved armchairs,
when painted pinewood, upholstered in American cloth, is, if lovelier,
not so lasting. Her reply was--"They get stalled on[3] 'em." And she
added: "Maybe a man 'll look at an old arm chair that's stood on t'
hearth-place as long as he can remember, and he'll say--'I'm fair sick
o' t' seet o' _yon_. We mun have a new 'un for t' Feast. _I'l chop
thee oop!_'"

[Footnote 3: "Stalled on"--tired of. "T' feast"--the village feast, an
annual festival and fair, for which most houses in that district are
cleaned within and whitewashed without.]

Possibly some of the Chippendale chairs also fell to the hatchet and
fed the flames, but most of them bore neglect as well as hardy
perennials, and when Queen Anne houses and "Old Chips" came into
fashion again, there was routing and rummaging from attic to cellar,
in farmhouse and cottage, and the banished furniture went triumphantly
back to its own place.

I first saw single dahlias in some "little gardens" in Cheshire, five
or six years ago. No others had ever been cultivated there. In these
quiet nooks the double dahlia was still a new-fangled flower. If the
single dahlias yet hold their own, those little gardens must now find
themselves in the height of the floral fashion, with the unusual luck
of the conservative old woman who "wore her bonnet till the fashions
came round again."

It is such little gardens which have kept for us the Blue Primrose, the
highly fragrant Summer Roses (including Rose de Meaux, and the red and
copper Briar), countless beautiful varieties of Daffy-down-dillies, and
all the host of sweet, various and hardy flowers which are now
returning, like the Chippendale chairs, from the village to the hall.

It is still in cottage gardens chiefly that the Crown Imperial hangs
its royal head. One may buy small sheaves of it in the Taunton
market-place on early summer Saturdays. What a stately flower it is!
and, in the paler variety of what an exquisite yellow! I always fancy
_Fritillaria Imperialis flava_ to be dressed in silk from the Flowery
Land--that robe of imperial yellow which only General Gordon and the
blood royal of China are entitled to wear!

"All is fine that is fit." And is the "bedding-out"
system--Ribbon-gardening--ever fit, and therefore ever fine? My little
friend, I am inclined to think that it sometimes is. For long straight
borders in parks and public promenade