Whether a house is used exclusively or not, the ordinary hot water pipes are simply inclosed in a brick or wood space, with ventilators that may be opened to let off part of the confined heat into the house at pleasure.  The front benches used are about two feet six inches to three feet in width, over, say four 4-inch pipes, up to within eighteen inches or two feet of the glass.  On this is a platform over which three to six inches of sand is put, and in this bed are placed the cuttings where, with the differences before mentioned, they are kept as uniform as possible, and the sand kept decidedly wet.  Almost everything we called soft wooded, or that can be got from the soft wood, even including most of our hardy shrubs, can be rooted with almost unerring certainty in the larger establishments by the hundreds of thousands.

As modern ideas demand large propagating, even in the summer, when it is next to impossible to keep these proportions of top and bottom heat, if in an ordinary propagating house, such firms as Miller & Hunt, strike out with another idea to overcome the difficulty.  This is none other than instead of glass, they have a muslin canvas-covered house, in which they have again pits, where mild bottom heat can be obtained by the use of spent hops, tan bark, manure, or other material.  Of course, it would be idle to talk of a summer bottom heat of 60 deg., but instead of that, they get one of about 80 deg., and depend upon a close, uniform, high, moist temperature to carry out the same results.

With this, rose plants can be and are raised by the hundreds of thousands from the single eye to a cutting, with a loss of not five per cent in the aggregate, and often not one per cent.  It is very evident that with new or scarce plants this is an enormous average, as by its means firms can import the new European plants in the spring, at perhaps very high rates, start them into immediate, rapid growth, and from half a dozen plants to work on, maybe in the next spring markets have hundreds for sale.

This is all new as managed by us old ’uns in former times, but he who expects to be up with the present day and cater for that class of patronage, must take the new and not the old way of doing things, or he will, in the vernacular of the streets, “get left.”

As we are on this particular topic, however, and as the amateur window plant-grower may want to propagate some little stock as well, even if not on these “high-falutin” ways, it might not be amiss to say that beyond the methods of “slipping” here and there cuttings in and among others growing in pots, or, mayhap, in a pot all by themselves, they can readily root lots of plants in a water and sand bath, which is nothing more than taking a deep saucer, putting half an inch of sand in the bottom, filling up the saucer full of water, and keeping it full; stick your cuttings into this, place right in the sunniest spot of your window, and they will grow about as certain, many of