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The sun was low, and tall trees sent their shadows across the grassy walks where Mary was moving without bonnet or parasol. She did not observe Mr. Farebrother's approach along the grass, and had just stooped down to lecture a small black-and-tan terrier, which would persist in walking on the sheet and smelling at the rose-leaves as Mary sprinkled them.
In spite of all this vigilance, however, at last she appeared without her silver wand; and soon after they saw her sink down on a couch of rose-leaves she had prepared for herself in a sumptuous apartment, where, had it not been for her hideous countenance, where all the malignant passions were portrayed, she would have looked like a sovereign resting on her bed of state.
Together with the swelling music swung the incense into high air; and to the Host the rose-leaves were flung. Still we followed. Still the long line moved on from altar to altar. Then, when the noon was long past, wearily we climbed upward to our inn. In the high streets there was much going to and fro. The shop-keepers already were taking down their linen. Pouffe!
He resembled one of his own gilt-edged securities, and to knock the gilt off by seeing anything he could avoid seeing would be, he felt instinctively, perverse and retrogressive. Those two crumpled rose-leaves, Fleur's caprice and Monsieur Profond's snout, would level away if he lay on them industriously.
Among other popular remedies were beetroot, box leaves, cabbage, cucumbers, black currants, digitalis, and euphorbia. A Russian remedy was Genista sentoria, and in Greece rose-leaves were used internally and externally as a poultice.
"I have thought of something," said the chimney-sweep; "let us get into the great pot-pourri jar which stands in the corner; there we can lie on rose-leaves and lavender, and throw salt in his eyes if he comes near us."
To sit in a room like the one I was sitting in, with the figures of the tapestry glimmering grey and lilac and purple in the twilight, the great bed, columned and curtained, looming in the middle, and the embers reddening beneath the overhanging mantelpiece of inlaid Italian stonework, a vague scent of rose-leaves and spices, put into the china bowls by the hands of ladies long since dead, while the clock downstairs sent up, every now and then, its faint silvery tune of forgotten days, filled the room; to do this is a special kind of voluptuousness, peculiar and complex and indescribable, like the half-drunkenness of opium or haschisch, and which, to be conveyed to others in any sense as I feel it, would require a genius, subtle and heady, like that of Baudelaire.
There was something exceedingly and touchingly beautiful in the attitude of that young wife her hands clasped, her lips moving with her prayer, like rose-leaves with the evening breeze, and her upturned face, with its holy and deep religious expression.
The men, who were mostly young, danced like college boys, while the women, who were all young and good dancers, floated through the measures with the ease of rose-leaves on a summer stream. Faces were flushed, eyes were bright, and but rarely a voice sounded that was not glad.
A hymenopterous relative of the Bees, the Megachile, cuts out in rose-leaves fragments of appropriate form which it bears away to a small hole in a tree, an abandoned mouse nest or some similar cavity. There it rolls them, works them up, and arranges them with much art, so as to manufacture what resemble thimbles, which it fills with honey and in which it lays.
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