London, May 20. When the een to America we taken by the "Duchess a ease wear my very best hat," said "For I'm Her Majesty's dep-u-tee."
I beg your pardon. It's the sort of thing that may happen to anyone in springtime. And after all it does give you the news. For the Duchess has been deputizing for the Queen, at the Alexandra Rose Day meeting at the Guildhall and at the Naval and Military Tournament; and everyone remarked what particularly smart hats she was wearing. She got out of the Chelsea Flower Show, however, having had some providential trouble with a tooth, of which she took full advantage, It was the Duchess of Gloucester's turn (she, too, wearing a new and attractive hat) to attend Queen Mary in an exhaustive tour of three acres of tents, Himalayas of rock gardens and seas of mud. It had been raining heavily for a couple of days and the grounds were a swamp. Gallant gardeners, plagiarizing on Sir Walter Raleigh, rushed forward to put down planks and sacking for the Royal shoes, which never the less got exceedingly muddy.
On the whole I think that the Duchess of Kent had decidedly the best of it. But flower shows always seem to me the worst possible way of seeing flowers, even without the added discomfort of wet feet. Chelsea Flower Show is, of course, the most wonderful display of its kind in the world, And there's the rub. It is for millionaires, not for the lowly gardener, who may well be discouraged by the miracles brought forth at Chelsea. I knew a man once, devoted to the theatre, who saw every play that came to the provincial town in which he lived, but would never visit a London theatre. "I can go io my own theatre every week," he explained, "but I could only afford London occasionally. It would make me discontented with what I can get at home, so I don't go." That philosophy seems to me to apply very well to the Chelsea Flower Show.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.