THE annual Flower Show and Gala in Jubilee Park was in part a serious function, in part a popular festival. But its secondary aspect was undoubtedly predominant.

Jubilee Park was sacred to those who thronged the close-packed southern and eastern areas of the city. Among many other things, held by the people of Blackhampton to be vastly more important, the town and its suburbs had a reputation for flowers. It was odd that it should have. Except perhaps a subtle quality in the soil, there was little in its corporate life or in its physical expression to account for the fact that it had long been famous for its roses. Among the hundreds of allotment holders on the outskirts of the city, practical rose growers abounded and these claimed an apotheosis at the annual show in Jubilee Park.

Almost the only vanity Mr. Josiah Munt had permitted himself in his earlier days was that he was a practical rose grower. He had competed at the show ever since there had been a show, and he had garnered so many prizes in the process that he now took rank as an expert. But he was more than that. He was now regarded as chief patron of a cult that was largely confined to the humbler and the poorer classes. A hard man, known throughout the city as very “near” in his business dealings, he was a despiser of public opinion and no seeker of popular applause. But of late years, having grown remarkably prosperous and a figure of ever-increasing consequence in the town, he made a practice just once in the year of “letting himself out a bit” at the function in Jubilee Park.

For one thing the Park itself was almost within a stone’s throw of the Duke of Wellington; and in Josiah’s opinion its sole merit was its contiguity to that famous public house. Personally he despised Jubilee Park and the class of persons who frequented it—they were a common lot—but now he had taken rank as the great man of this particular neighborhood, wherein he had been born and had sown the seeds of his fortune, it did him no harm in his own esteem or in that of the people who had known him in humbler days, once a year to savor his preËminence.

Tuesday, August the Fourth, was one of the hottest days within the memory of Blackhampton. And in that low-lying, over-populated area of which Jubilee Park was the center it seemed hotter than anywhere else. Being the day after Bank Holiday, a large section of the community “had taken another day off,” therefore several thousand persons of all ages and both sexes assembled on the brown bare grass in the course of the afternoon.

To say that the bulk of these had been attracted to those shadeless precincts by a display of roses would be too polite a compliment. The Blackhampton Prize Brass Band was the undoubted magnet of the many. Then there were tea al fresco for the ladies, a baby show and a beauty competition, beer and bowls for the gentlemen, dancing to follow and also fireworks. When the Show was considered in all its aspects, the roses only appealed to a small minority; the roses in fact were hardly more than a pretext for a local saturnalia, but in the middle of the sward was a large tent wherein the competing blooms were displayed. Close by was a tent considerably less in size if intrinsically the more imposing, to which a square piece of cardboard was attached by a blue ribbon. It bore the legend “President and Committee.”

At the entrance to this smaller tent a number of important looking but perspiring gentlemen were seated in a semicircle on garden chairs. And in the center of these, with rather the air of Jupiter among his satellites, was Mr. Josiah Munt. Several members of the committee, all badged and rosetted as they were, had removed their coats out of deference to the thermometer, but the President was not of these. Under the famous white pot hat, which in the southeastern district of his native city was as famous as the Gladstone collar and the Chamberlain eyeglass, was artfully disposed a cool cabbage leaf, and over all was a large white sun umbrella.

The sun umbrella marked a precedent. It was a symbol, a herald of the President’s ever advancing social status. All the same it was not allowed to mar a certain large geniality with which he always bore himself at the Rose Show. By nature the proprietor of the Duke of Wellington was not an expansive man, particularly in the world of affairs, but once a year, at least, he made a point of unbending as far as it was in him to do so.

This afternoon the President was accessible to all and sundry as of yore. Moreover he had followed his time-honored custom of regaling the committee, most of whom were “substantial men” and the cronies of an earlier, more primitive phase in the ascending fortunes of the future mayor of the city, with whisky and cigars, conveyed specially from the Duke of Wellington by George the head barman. But it was clear as the afternoon advanced and the heat increased with the ever-growing throng, that the subject of roses and even the martial strains of Rule Britannia, Hearts of Oak and other accepted masterpieces rendered with amazing brio by the B.P.B.B. did not wholly occupy the thoughts of these distinguished men.

Among the Olympians who sat in the magic semicircle at the mouth of their own private tent and enjoyed the President’s whisky and cigars and the privilege of personal intercourse with him was a foxy-looking man with large ears and large spectacles. Julius Weiss by name, he had migrated from his native Germany thirty years before, and by specializing in what was technically known as “a threepenny hair-cut” had risen to the position of a master hair-dresser with six shops of his own in the city. A man of keen intelligence and cosmopolitan outlook, there were times in the course of the afternoon when he seemed to claim more of the President’s attention than the ostensible business in hand.

“No, I don’t trust our gov’ment,” said Josiah for the tenth time, when a cornet solo, the Battle of Prague (“Bandsman Rosher”) had been brought to a triumphant close. “Never have trusted ’em if it comes to that.”

“That’s because you’re a blooming Tory,” ventured the only hungry looking member of an extremely well-nourished looking committee—an obvious intellectual with piercing black eyes and fiercely picturesque mustache whose hue was as the raven.

“Politics is barred, Lewis!” It was the President’s Saturday morning manner at the City Hall, but its austerity was tactfully mitigated by a dexterous passing of the cigar box. “We ought to go in now ... this minute. What do you say, Weiss?”

The master hair-dresser screwed up a pair of vulpine eyes and then replied in a low harsh guttural, “It is a big t’ing to fight Chermany.”

“We are not afraid of you,” interjected a pugnacious Committee-man. “Don’t you think that.”

The President held up a stern finger. “No, no, Jennings.” It was a breach of taste and the President glared at the offender from under his cabbage leaf. He had a deep instinct for fair play, a curious impartiality that enabled him to see the merits of Weiss as a taxpayer and a citizen. In the lump he approved of Germans as little as any one else, but such a man as Weiss with his unceasing industry, his organizing capacity, his business ability and his social qualities was a real asset to the city.

The little hair-dresser broke a solemn pause. “We are not ready for war.” He stressed the “we” to the plain annoyance of several committee-men, although Josiah was not of the number. “A month from now they’ll be in Paris.”

“I don’t think,” said the truculent Jennings.

“You’ll see, my tear,” said Julius Weiss.

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