Jersey tea,” for instance, a pretty shrub, and the “Labrador tea,” a low evergreen with handsome white flowers. Certainly it was only fair that the women should have their share of privations in the shape of pins and tea, when Washington and his brave army were half clad, half armed, half starved, and never paid; the soldiers of that remarkable war, both officers and men, if not literally using the spines of the thorn-tree, like their wives, often went about looking something like Spenser's picture of Despair:
| “ | His garments naught but many ragged clouts, |
| With thorns together pinned, and patched was.” |
In some farm-houses where much knitting and spinning is going on, one occasionally sees a leafless branch of a thorn-bush hanging in a corner, with a ball of yarn on each spine: quite a pretty, rustic device. We saw one the other day which we admired very much.
Monday, 18th.—Lovely day; thermometer 82 in the shade at dinner-time. The wild roses are in flower. We have them of three varieties: the early rose, with reddish branches, which seldom blooms here until the first week in June; the low rose, with a few large flowers; and the tall many-flowered swamp rose, blooming late in the summer. They are quite common about us, and although the humblest of their tribe, they have a grace all their own; there is, indeed, a peculiar modesty about the wild rose which that of the gardens does not always possess. There is one caprice of the gardening art to-day which a rustic finds it difficult to admire, and that is the tall grafted tree roses taking a form which nature assuredly never yet gave to a rose-bush. The flowers themselves may be magnificent as flowers, but one stares at them with curiosity, one does not turn to them with affection;
