It was only a day or two before receiving the Gardeners' Monthly that I was thinking of this rose, so familiar to me in my childhood, but which I have not seen for forty or more years. I was therefore specially interested in reading Mrs. Thomson's article respecting it, under its true name; for I have no doubt that the York and Lancaster rose is identical with the one I only knew as the Marbled Rose. I have often queried why it never appears in the Rose catalogues, and whether it was lost to the world. The neighbor who had the red and white rose, had another she called the Damask rose, and one she called the Hundred-leaf rose. This was really the finest of all. It was a solid rose and worthy of its name. I never have seen a rose so solid full of leaves; its color, if I remember right, was a delicate carmine, shading to a very light blush, and so deliciously sweet. My home when a child was in a lone farmhouse, and there were no rose bushes, no flowering shrubs, nothing but a little girl's garden of the most simple flowers grown and a bush of Southernwood ! Well do I remember how fond our dear mother was of that fragrant plant. You may be sure that I always visited my good neighbor who lived half a mile away, and had the roses, when I knew they were in bloom.

She had lilacs too, and tall hollyhocks with their great single blooms. How memory runs back to those far away years ! I am a child again ! I see those flowers just as I saw them then, and remember the color of the hollyhocks - pink, yellow and maroon. Well, if I did not have the cultured flowers, I had the wild ones all around me in grand profusion.

Ere the snow had fully melted, I went in quest of the May flowers - April flowers they were more truly; and by their true name, Trailing Arbutus, I never knew them till long years after. They grew in the greatest profusion on the farm, and I knew well where the largest and pinkest could be found. What basketfuls I gathered, and their perfume filled the house. Just about one year ago, a lady who lives very near my childhood home, though an entire stranger to me, gathered some of the blossoms from the old home, and sent them to me. It was so kind and thoughtful of her. There were Anemones and Hepaticas and Aqui-legias in profusion, beautiful wild orchids, the lowly violets, and in the woods I found the white and, far more rare, the yellow violet. There were great scarlet lilies in the field among the tall waving grass, and in late autumn, the fringed Gentian grew abundantly on a hill-side. It was to me a lovely flower, but I never learned its name till many years after I had gone far away.

But whither am I drifting? I took my pen to write a single paragraph about the red and white rose, and it has led me rambling again over the knolls and hills in search of the flowers of my childhood; surely I am in my dotage !

Yarmouth, Maine.