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Over the windows of all the houses boards were nailed; the doors were locked; the gates closed; and in many of the gardens, crops of weeds were beginning to choke the flower-beds. From some of the houses of the more enthusiastic Saints all the wood-work was removed, leaving nothing standing except the bare adobe walls, while a few had been burned to the ground.

The tiny flower-beds just under her window were left, with their snap-dragons and larkspurs, in dew and shadow; the small dog stood on the threshold, and barked uneasily when the bell rang in the Ursulines' Chapel, where the nuns were at matins. It was Sunday, and a soft tranquillity blest the cool air in which the young girl bathed her troubled spirit.

A bright autumn sun shining out of a cloudless heaven bathed the green lawn and the many-coloured flower-beds in its golden light. The air, the leaves, the birds, all spoke of life. It was hard to think that death was closing its grip upon him who owned them all. A plump little gentleman in black was just descending the steps. "Well, doctor," the merchant asked, "how is your patient?"

Two bays of this stood open down to the ground. Looking out, beyond the rich brown of the newly-turned earth in the flower-beds, the lawn stretched away a dim greyish green, under the long shadows cast by the hollies masking the wall on the left, and glittering, powdered by myriads of scintillating dewdrops, where the early sunshine slanted down on it from between their stiff pinnacles and sharply serrated crests.

But the great red-brick house, peering through its sun-blinds, among the flower-beds, with a rookery behind in the tall trees of a grove, and the cupola of stable-buildings among the shrubberies, that one saw in a flash as the train emerged from the low cutting; or the tiled roofs of houses, with an old mouldering church-tower peering out above them, in a gap between green downs; or a quiet manor-house among pastures, seen at the close of day when the shadows began to lengthen, gave him a sense of the long succession of peaceable lives the boy returning from school to the familiar home, or the old squire, after a life of pleasant activities, walking among the well-known fields, and knowing that he must soon make haste to begone and leave his place for others.

A little plot of ground was railed off in the garden of the Tuileries for the dauphin's amusement; and one of her favorite relaxations was to watch him working at the flower-beds himself with his little hoe and rake; though, as if to mark that they were in fact prisoners, both she and he were followed wherever they went by grenadiers of the city-guard, and were not allowed to dispense with their attendance for a single moment.

To and fro, in front of the flower-beds and the band rotunda, the couples and groups paraded, stopped to talk, to greet, to buy a handful of flowers from the old beggar who had his tray fixed to the railings. Little children ran among them, swooping and laughing; little boys with big white silk bows under their chins, little girls, little French dolls, dressed up in velvet and lace.

"Lookee 'ere," says Gale, "I didn't know it wur the Judge doin' me the honour to tear my flower-beds to pieces. I bin workin' at these 'ere beds for months, and here they are spilt in a minit; but I tell ee what, Orkins or no Orkins, he ain't gwine to play hell with my flower-beds like that 'ere. If he wants the ground for public improvement, as you call it, well, you can take it under the Act.

Islands and capes hung high in air, with their inverted images below them; long sand-hills rolled and weltered in the mirage; and the yellow flower-beds, and huge thorny cacti like giant candelabra, which clothed the glaring slopes, twisted, tossed, and flickered, till the whole scene seemed one blazing phantom-world, in which everything was as unstable as it was fantastic, even to the sun itself, distorted into strange oval and pear-shaped figures by the beds of crimson mist through which he sank to rest.

Bees, cold water shining deep in the well, and the samovar chuckling behind the flower-beds, and fifteen versts away the Austrians challenging the Russian nation!... "You know," Andrey Vassilievitch said to me, "it's very disheartening." Marie Ivanovna at the end of the first week spoke her mind.