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The warm sunlight had set the meadow cocks a crowing. The far reaches of the great, grassy plain were dimmed with haze. It was a vast, flowery wilderness, waving and murmuring in the breeze like an ocean. How long those acres, sown by the winds of heaven, had waited for the plowman now arrived!

The Major has been admiring `The Flowery Way. It certainly looks its best to- night." She turned towards Major Humphreys with her light, cynical laugh. "My son declares that it is profanation to allow ordinary, commonplace mortals to walk up those steps! He always escorts my visitors round by another way.

At last, after some days, the sun again appeared and shone brightly over the white ground, but he went to bed again behind the mountains at a very early hour, as if he did not find such pleasure in looking down on the earth as when everything was green and flowery.

The shrubs were diligently cut away to open walks where the shades ware darkest; the boughs of opposite trees were artificially interwoven; seats of flowery turf were raised in vacant spaces; and a rivulet that wantoned along the side of a winding path had its banks sometimes opened into small basins, and its stream sometimes obstructed by little mounds of stone heaped together to increase its murmurs.

If I dare express a doubt that the path to victory will be a flowery one, eyes flash, cheeks burn, and tongues clatter, till all are checked up suddenly by a warning for "Order, order!" from the amiable lady presiding. Thus we swallow politics with every meal. We take a mouthful and read a telegram, one eye on table, the other on the paper.

There were some villages in the course of that swift flight where we could have willingly spent a week of such Sundays: villages with gables and thatches and tiles, and flowery door-yards and kitchen-gardens, such as could not be had for millionaire money with us, and villagers in their church-going best, whom, as they lived in the precious scene, our lightning progress suffered us to behold in a sort of cinematographic shimmer.

The sailor sighed fit to shake the whole small tenement and nodded in consent; so, observing nothing of his reluctance to their once favorite subject, Glory launched forth: "'Sailors' Snug Harbor' is the most beautifulest spot in the whole world! It's all flowery an' grassy an' treesy. It's got fountains an' birds an' orchestry-music forever an' ever.

Myriads of flowers gleam in their own atmosphere of living light, like jewels among the rich herbage, so that the feet can hardly be set down without crushing scores of them: the Orchis rubra with its splendid spike of crimson blossoms, the bee and spider orchises in great variety, whose flowers mimic the insects after whom they are named, sweet-scented alyssum, golden buttercups and hawkweeds, Roman daisies, larger and taller than the English ones, with the bold wide-eyed gaze you see in the Roman peasant-girls, scarlet poppies glowing in a sunshine of their own, like flames in the heart of a furnace, vetches bright azure and pale yellow, dark blue hyacinths, pink geraniums, and "moonlit spires of asphodel," suggestive of the flowery fields of the immortals.

It is a stern road, that would make the "rocky road to Dublin" look like a "flowery bed of ease," though we followed it only a mile and a half to leave it for the steep trail that reaches Rock Bound Lake. This is one of the larger of the small glacial lakes of the Tahoe Region, and is near enough to Rubicon Springs to be reached easily on foot.

All the pulses of his being slacken; he draws back as it were from his own fate, surveys it as a whole, separates himself from it. The various scenes of it succeed each other in memory, set always incomparably set in the spring green of the forest, or under a charmed moonlight, or amid the flowery detail of a closed garden.