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A strange experience it is to enter the heart of a volcano that is still comparatively active, and to observe woods of poplar and a large pine tree beneath which grow masses of spring flowersbright blue bugloss, the crimson vetch, starch hyacinths, purple self-heal, and golden spurgeand to pass from these thickets on to a space of bare white-coloured ground that trembles and sways under the feet like a sheet of insecure ice.

He is rich enough for you as well as for us." I heard no voice, but surely I heard that whisper, plain enough. The roses seemed to kiss me with it. The sweet azalea repeated it. The hyacinths stood witnesses of it. The gay tulips and amaryllis held up a banner before me on which it was blazoned.

England will then seem to us a veritable garden, the greenness of everything, the trimness of the hedges, the sheets of purple hyacinths, and some still remaining primroses, will startle us with joy, though we have long been aware of their beauty. This time we both know and enjoy the Natural Beauty. We see from this instance the distinction between knowing Natural Beauty and enjoying it.

Sometimes it shakes the hyacinths like a rattle of silver, and spreads the turf above with a litter of coloured toys. Here the butterflies are born with the first warm breath of the spring. All the winter they lie hidden in the crevices of the stone, in the carving of little names, and with the first spring day they stand delicately and dry their yellow wings on the little graves.

So with something like excitement Emily who at seventy would still have liked a little feast and fashion now and then ordered dinner for six instead of two, herself wrote a number of foreign words on cards, and arranged the flowers mimosa from the Riviera, and white Roman hyacinths not from Rome.

Flowers were everywhere, in the gardens of the rich, at the windows of the poor. The stalls in the market were gay with plumy lilacs, splendid tulips, roses of every shade, and hyacinths heavy with odour.

Here and there it ran for a considerable distance through beautiful avenues of fine elms and yews; the hawthorne hedges which bordered it almost everywhere were trimmed with careful exactness; and yet amid all this precision there bloomed in many places the sweet English wild flowers forget-me-nots, violets, wild hyacinths and bluebells.

Oh, here he comes, and papa with him! We went across the trim little lawn, which lay waiting for the warmer weather to burst into a profusion of roses, and through a trellised porch entered a shadowy little hall, with heads of stags and foxes, an old-fashioned glass-doored bookcase, and hunting and riding whips, whence we passed into a low-pitched drawing-room, redolent of dried rose-leaves and fresh hyacinths.

Maryllia tied on her hat with its pink strings and its bunch of pink hyacinths tumbling against her small shell-like ear, and looked up from under its brim with an entrancing smile. "Will you come, Mr. Walden?" John murmured something politely inarticulate in assent.

Robin was happy because there were flutings of birds in the air, gardeners were stuffing crocuses and hyacinths into the flower beds, there were little sweet scents floating about and so it was Spring. She pulled a bare looking branch of a lilac bush towards her and stooped and kissed the tiny brown buttons upon it, half shyly. "I can't help it when I see the first ones swelling on the twigs.