"Have you?" said I, with a sigh. "I fancy I'm rearing a middling lot of them myself."
"Please, sir," said he to me on another occasion, "that there lumbago be terrible trying to know what to do with it."
"Oh!" said I with alacrity, "nothing equals hartshorn and oil applied to the small of the back with a flannel. You have a wife—"
"Yes, sir." He looked at me vacantly. "And yet, it's a beautiful thing."
"Well—yes, when it attacks one's deadly enemy."
"I've cut it down, and trimmed it out, and tied it up," said the gardener.
He meant the Plumbago capense!
That man never would allow that he was beaten. My eldest boy one day held some pansies over the fumes of ammonia, turned them green, and showed them as a lusus naturæ to the gardener. He smiled contemptuously. "Them's the colour of biled cabbage," said he; "I grew them verdigris green—beds of 'em, when I was with Squire Cross."
One day he said to me: "The nurserymen call them plants big onias just to sell them, I call them little onias; you shall just see them I grow, them be the true big onias, as large as the palm of your hand."
I tumbled, by hazard, at Nice into a pension, where I believe I saw at table d'hôte a score of the ugliest women I have ever had the trial of sitting over against in my long career. I found out, in conversation with a porter at the station afterwards, that this pension was notorious for the ugly women who put up there, and it is a joke among the porters when they see one very ill-favoured arrive by the train, that she is going to be an inmate of the Hotel ——. The name I will not give, lest any of my fair readers, in that spirit of delightful perversity that characterises the sex, should go there and spoil the credit of the pension. I could not endure the table d'hôte there for many days. An ugly woman is, or may be, restful for the eye when her face is in repose—not when she is chewing tough beef or munching an apple. Besides, Lent was passed.
When I was in Rome there appeared in a comic paper at the beginning of Lent the picture of a very stout lady, who thus addressed her spouse. "Hubby, dear! you haven't kissed me." "Can't, love," he replies, "fat is forbidden in Lent." Ugliness was uncongenial to me in radiantly beautiful Nice, and in sparkling Easter—so I packed my Gladstone bag and went further.