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The fiddler walked in front with his violin, gay with ribbons in its pegs. Then came the married pair, the relations, the friends, all following pell-mell; the children stayed behind amusing themselves plucking the bell-flowers from oat-ears, or playing among themselves unseen.

The morning following his betrothal he sent Violet an exquisite bouquet composed of blue and white bell-flowers, cape jasmine, and box, which breathed to the young girl, who was versed in the language of flowers, of gratitude, constancy, and joyfulness of heart. She turned white and faint again at the sight of them, and a broken-hearted sob burst from her lips.

Indigo-blue bell-flowers and red and white tormentils were still in bloom, while in the clefts of the rocks she came upon the red wall-pepper and a kind of yellow ragwort.

The hedges were green with open buds, and bubbling with the laughter and ecstasy of the birds; the high sloping overhung Sussex lanes were sweet with violets and primroses; and here and there under the boughs Anthony saw the blue carpet of bell-flowers spread.

It was like a garden clematis, honeysuckle, and jasmine clung about the olive and mulberry trees, and there were tulips and gladiolus, and clumps of mandrake, which has bell-flowers that look as though they were cut out of dark blue jewels. In the distance were the mountains of Lebanon. The house they came to at last was rather like a bungalow long and low, with pillars all along the front.

Can you easily tell them apart?" "Yes, as easily as you know different dress fabrics at Arnold's. Those umbrella-shaped trees are Rhode Island greenings; those that are rather long and slender branching are yellow bell-flowers; and those with short and stubby branches and twigs are the old-fashioned dominies. Over there are Newtown pippins. Don't you see how green the fruit is?

A branch, for instance, is producing Yellow Bell-flowers. At a certain point in its growth where it has the diameter of a man's thumb it may be grafted with the Red Baldwin. When the scion has grown for two or three years, its leading shoots can be grafted with the Roxbury Russet, and eventually the terminal bough of this growth with the Early Harvest.

Other bell-flowers, as the hemerocallis and amaryllis, have their bells nodding only, as it were, or hanging obliquely toward the horizon; which, as their stems are slender, turn like a weathercock from the wind; and thus very effectually preserve their inclosed stamens and anthers from the rain and cold.

But, one fine day, a number of little poppies and thistles and dandelions and burdocks and bell-flowers stuck their heads up above the ground in the midst of the luxuriant rye. "What's the meaning of this now?" asked the rye. "How in the world did you get here?" And the poppy looked at the bell-flower and asked: "How did you get here?"

Through the woodland, as I passed, I saw violets in hollows and blue innocence starring moist glades with its heavenly color, and in the drier woods those slender-stemmed blue bell-flowers which some call the Venus's looking-glass.