very unpleasant. But in spring it is always fresh.

Tulip cultivation is now a steady humdrum business, very different
from the early days of the fashion for the flower, in the seventeenth
century, when speculators lost their heads over bulbs as thoroughly as
over South-Sea stock in the great Bubble period. Thousands of florins
were given for a single bulb. The bulb, however, did not always change
hands, often serving merely as a gambling basis; it even may not have
existed at all. Among genuine connoisseurs genuine sales would of
course be made, and it is recorded that a "Semper Augustus" bulb was
once bought for 13,000 florins. At last the Government interfered;
gambling was put down; and "Semper Augustus" fell to fifty florins.

It was to Haarlem, it will be remembered, that the fair Frisian
travelled with Cornelius van Baerle's solitary flower in _La Tulipe
Noire_, and won the prize of 100,000 florins offered for a blossom
of pure nigritude by the Horticultural Society of Haarlem. Hence the
addition of the Tulipa Nigra Rosa Baerleensis to the list of desirable
bulbs. Dumas puts into the mouth of Cornelius a very charming song
of the tulip:--


Nous sommes les filles du feu secret,
Du feu qui circule dans les veines de la terre;
Nous sommes les filles de l'aurore et de la rosée,
Nous sommes les filles de l'air,
Nous sommes les filles de l'eau;
Mais nous sommes avant tout les filles du ciel.