* * * * HOSPITABLE ENGLAND.
While some natives were complaining of our spring weather I met an Australian, enjoying his first visit to England, who could not contain his lyrical admiration. " This spring of yours," he said, " is even more than it is boasted to be." The gardens delight him only less than the green of hedge, tree and spinney, and the primroses of the woods. The tulips in cottage gardens were one of the beauties he contrasted with Queensland's. As I listened to his lyric, it seemed to me that we have come to regard too many common things as common- place. After all, and when all is said, our clime is hospitable to flowers that blow in almost every quarter of the world the
tulip of Scandinavia, the lithospermum and cistus of the Pyrenees, the nemesia and gerbera of South Africa, the hooded gladiolus of the Zambesi Falls, the rhododendron or poppy of the Himalayas, the golden rod of Newfoundland, the lily of the Selkirks. Trees and flowers from all the continents snuggle down into our soft gardens, as if to the manner born ; and respond like any quick or kex to the seduction of our partial showers and partial suns.
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