Volume 1 — From The Victoria Magazine. WISDOM BY EXPERIENCE.

What a shame! What abominable interference! What cruelty! What tyranny! These and many other strong expressions of the same kind proceeded from a collection of rose-stocks planted ready for budding. They were all fiercely angry and indignant, and first one and then another uttered some exclamation of disgust, and then all joined in a chorus of maledictions on the gardener who had done them so much injury. It was in the month of June that their feelings were so much excited, just when the sap was most active, and they were throwing out their most luxuriant shoots. I don't know how they went on when the gardener first dug them up out of the hedges, and cut away all their side branches and left only a single straight stem. If they did not make a fight for it then, it must have been because their sap was all dried up, and their leaves had fallen off, and they were in low spirits, and did not much care what became of them. But even then I don't think they yielded without a struggle, and I have no doubt there was a good deal of scratching and dragging back, {852} and a great show of independence and sullenness. But they had not the spirits to keep up resistance, and the gardener did not give them much chance, for he pruned them close, and planted them in rows just far enough apart to prevent the possibility of their having much intercourse, or of the evil disposed corrupting the more docile. But it was different in June, when, as I said, the sap was active, and their branches began to grow out on all sides, so that they could reach each other and even take a sly pinch at the gardener or any of his friends who happened to come near. And the particular irritation now was because the gardener had discovered how wild they were becoming, and set resolutely about restraining them. First of all he cut off all the suckers that grew from the roots, and the lower shoots, leaving only those that grew at the crown of the stock, and then he put them all straight up, and would not let them loll about or hang over the path—a habit they had got into which was very disagreeable to those who passed by. And if they would not stand upright without, he fastened them to pieces of board let into the ground. This was a great grievance, but I think they most rebelled at having their lower boughs cut off, for if left to themselves they would have spread and puffed themselves out in a most ridiculous way.

Now it so happened that Madame Boll, a stock of a former year which had been budded, but left in its place and not removed with the rest into the flower-garden, heard their exclamations of anger and impatience, and having perhaps gone through some such phase of feeling herself, and thus gained wisdom by experience, she thought she would try if she could put their case to them in a better light; so she took advantage of a little lull in the storm, and said in a gentle, ladylike tone,

"My young friends, I am very sorry to see you so unhappy; but perhaps if you will hear what I have got to say, you might think better of your present position."

"Well," said Miss Strong, who was tossing her long arms about in a very excited way, only luckily she was out of reach, "if you are going to take the gardener's part, and preach patience and submission, and that sort of thing, I can tell you you had better keep your remarks to yourself, or if I can get at you, I'll spoil that neat head-dress of yours, which, let me tell you, is not half as pretty as hundreds in the hedgerows, or as ours would have been, if we had been left to our own devices as we were last year;" which tirade she ended with a scornful laugh in which many of the others joined.

But little Miss Wild-Rose, who was nearer, said quietly,

"Perhaps it would be as well to hear what is said on the other side; particularly as, it is too hot to go on screaming and abusing people who don't seem to care about it;" and as several of the others were of the same opinion, Madame Boll took courage, and said what was in her mind.

"Perhaps it may give you more confidence in me to know, that when I was first placed here I had many of the same thoughts and feelings that you appear to have. I did not know why I was taken out of the hedgerow, and trimmed and restrained, and not allowed to have my own way; and I confess I thought it very hard. Particularly I was indignant, as no doubt you will be when the time comes (for you have still a good deal to undergo which you know nothing about at present),—I was, I say, very indignant when the gardener cut a slit in the only shoot which he had left me, and which was growing very luxuriant, and I was quite proud of it; and introduced a meagre little bud from another tree, and made me nourish and strengthen it, though I knew that my own shoot would suffer by it; and so it turned out; for after a while, when the bud began to grow, he cut away {853} my natural shoot altogether, and left only that which had been inserted."

Here Miss Strong broke in.

"You were very tame to submit to it. I would have banged and twisted about till I had got rid of it some way or other."

"Ah!" said Madame Boll, "we shall see; you are stronger and more resolute than I was. All I know is, I could not help myself."

"Cowardly creature!" muttered Miss Strong, scornfully. But Madame Boll resumed:

"I soon got used to the change, and gradually began to take an interest in the bud I had adopted; and though of course Miss Strong may affect to despise its beauty, I can assure you that most people have a different opinion."

Whereupon, Madame Boll gave herself airs, and coquettishly moved aside a leaf or two, and displayed a most perfect and symmetrical rose.

"But," said Miss Wild-Rose and her party all in a breath, "do you mean that we shall all bear roses like that?"

"Not all, certainly, possibly none of you exactly like, for there are hundreds of varieties, and many of them much more beautiful. It will be just as the gardener fancies, though he is generally guided in his selection by the habit and vigor of the stock, I daresay he will give Miss Strong, who is so energetic, a bud of Gloire de Dijon, or Anna de Diesbach, and you, being weaker, will have Devoniensis, or Niphetos."

Miss Strong gave a scornful toss at this, but did not vouchsafe any remark, though I think she felt rather complimented, and the others began to muse, since it must be so, what rose they would be likely to have, and which would become them best.

A little time after this it turned out just as Madame Boll had said—the gardener came one morning and began to bud the stocks, and just as he was preparing Miss Wild-Rose for the operation, a young lady came by, and asked what bud he intended for that one, for, she said, "I want a Devoniensis, and I think it would just suit it."

"I have got a Devoniensis bud here," he said, "and will put it in."

"And that tall one I think I should like for Gloire de Dijon."

"I will try," he said, "but somehow I am half afraid I shall have some trouble with it, for though vigorous it is rather awkward, and the thorns are very spiteful. To say the truth, I am half afraid of it, and have been leaving it till the last."

"But what," said the lady, "is this in the corner? Surely it is Madame Boll; and such a beauty! What is it doing here?"

"To say the truth, ma'am, I overlooked it when I planted the others out, and now it must remain where it is for another year."

"Well," she said, "I hope the others will take pattern from it and do as well."

"So," said Madame Boll, after they were gone, "that accounts for my being left here: I must confess I was a little mortified, for I thought it was a slight; but I generally find, if we wait awhile, everything comes right in the end, and possibly my being here has done you some good, or given you comfort; and if so, instead of regret, I ought to feel pleasure. But now, my young friends, I will tell you a conversation I overheard one day, between the young lady who was here just now and another, which your foolish behavior a short time ago brought to my mind. They were talking about the children in the school, and how difficult it was to make them feel the advantage of being submissive and conforming to their rules. They said they were so anxious to have their own way, and seemed to think it was a pleasure to their teachers to thwart them, or make them do what they did not wish, and not that it was intended for their good; and if their teachers thought they paid too much attention to their dress, {854} and wished to be smart, and wear flowers and feathers, when they ought rather to be adorning their minds, and beautifying their tempers, and enriching their understanding, they were ready to cry out, as you did just now, 'What tyranny!' 'How interfering!' 'Why can't they let us dress as we like?' But what they were particularly complaining about on that occasion, was that the children would persist in wearing hoops which stuck out their clothes, and made them take up twice as much room as they otherwise would have done. For, it seems, the benches where they sat were only large enough for them if they sat close together, which they could not do with hoops on, so they were obliged to tell them they could not take them into the school if they did not lay aside their hoops, and some of them were foolish enough to say that they would not come to school if they were not allowed to wear hoops. Now, it struck me, this was just like your folly in wishing to keep your wild-growing suckers and lower branches, when you know very well that they would take away all the nourishment which is needed to bring the beautiful rose-buds to perfection; the bud, in your place, answering to the knowledge and other excellences which it is the object of education to impart to their ignorant and lawless natures, and which, in after years, when they are able to appreciate them, they prize highly, and can hardly understand what it was that made them so averse to go through the process necessary for their acquirement."

A year or two afterward I saw the young lady and the gardener looking at a bed of beautiful roses on the lawn, and heard the young lady ask what had become of the Devoniensis she had asked him to bud.

"Don't you see it, ma'am," he said, "growing against the wall? I think it is almost the gem of the whole garden."

"Oh, what a beauty!" she exclaimed; "and how well it has grown!"

"Yes, ma'am," he said; "it has always done well; it seemed to take to it kindly from the very first, and has never gone back at all. But I had a good deal of trouble with this one; perhaps you may remember my saying I thought it likely I should. It is that strong growing one you remarked at the same time when you told me to bud the Devoniensis. It won't make much show this year. It wasted so much energy in putting out side-shoots and suckers. But I think it has got out of its bad ways, and next year I hope it will make quite a grand tree."

"Oh!" she said, "and here is my old friend Madame Boll, I see. I am glad you put it here, it is well worth a good place."

"You hear," said Madame Boll, after they were gone, to her neighbor Gloire de Dijon, "what they say of us, and I hope you have become reconciled to the change, and will let the good that is in you show itself."

Whereupon there seemed to come rather a lachrymose murmur from the dwarfed shoot of Gloire de Dijon. "But am I not to flower at all this year?"

"Well, my dear," said Madame Boll, tenderly, "I do not wish to be severe or say anything to hurt your feelings, but you must know that your present disappointment is the natural result of your past conduct. You were so determined to indulge in perverse and self-willed suckers, and you never let the gardener touch you without trying to prick his fingers or tear his clothes. And now all you want is a little patience. Who knows but you may be allowed to bloom in the autumn, and perhaps win the prize at the last flower show? But if not, why it will be all right next year. Do you think it was no mortification to me to be neglected and almost unnoticed last year, and that, as it appears, entirely owing to the carelessness of others, and not from any fault of mine? Well, you see, I have got over it; and very likely next year {855} you will have the gratification of hearing the lady praise you as she did me just now. Be thankful that experience with you has not come too late."

When Madame Boll ended, I could see on the edge of one of her delicate leaves a drop of dew, and I said to myself, "How very like a tear!"