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It holds in its mazes stray bits of color, scarlet berries, evergreen sprigs, blue raspberry-stems, and sprays of yellow willow; glittering necklaces and wreaths and tiaras of brilliant ice-work cling and trail around its edges, and no regal palace shines with such carcanets of jewels as this winter ball-room of the dancing drops.

At first Westover thought they were fishhooks and artificial flies, such as the guides wear in the Adirondacks to advertise their calling about the hotel offices and the piazzas. But another glance showd him that they were sprays and wild flowers of various sorts, with gay mosses and fungi and some stems of Indian-pipe. Whitwell seemed pleased that these things should have caught Westover's eye.

Such fountains, candelabra, Gothic pinnacles, tufts of plumes, colossal sprays of coral, and the embodiments of the fairy pencillings of frost on window panes, wrought in crystal and silver, are beyond the power of pen or pencil. It was a wilderness of beauty; we knew not where to look, nor which forms to choose, in the dazzling confusion.

Of course, it was some time before we could pause in our fierce and laborious exertions; but all through the work, the excitement, the uproar, and some dismay, we were aware of this silent little man at the break of the poop, perfectly motionless, soundless, and often hidden from us by the drift of sprays.

She was glad that there was grass under her feet and that her steps made no sounds. She walked under one of the fairy-like gray arches between the trees and looked up at the sprays and tendrils which formed them. "I wonder if they are all quite dead," she said. "Is it all a quite dead garden? I wish it wasn't."

All the fainter colours change every five minutes, wondrously change and shift like tones and shades of fine shot-silks. As soon as one can get a chance to look one finds there is nothing to look at but a few vases containing sprays of flowers, or perhaps some light gracious branches freshly cut from a blossoming tree.

On one of those delicious days that came in the middle of this year's April, warmth and fresh earth-smells breathing all about, the wide sprays of the lofty boughs lying tinged in rosy purple, a web-like tracery upon the sky whose azure was divine, the air itself lucid and mellow, as if some star had been dissolved within it, on such a day the little foreign letter came, telling that at length balm had dropped upon the weary eyelids, Elizabeth Sheppard was dead.

Then she made a small sign to him, retired quickly into her cabin, and rapidly wrote some words on a piece of paper ornamented with sprays of rose peach. She rolled it in a silk handkerchief and cleverly threw it to Ya-nei, who caught it in both hands. They saluted each other, and reclosed their port-holes. He unfolded the handkerchief and smoothed out the crinkled leaf.

Sprays of pale flowers blossom upon it in August, followed in a few months by pods containing three speckled seeds which look like smooth, slightly flattened nutmegs. When the seeds are ready to drop the outer covering of the pod bursts with a loud report, the seeds shooting in all directions. This is Nature's clever scheme to spread the Hevea family.

It makes its finest appearance during the months of June and July, when the brown buds at the ends of the sprays swell and open, revealing the young leaves, which at first are bright yellow, making the tree appear as if covered with gay blossoms; while the pendulous bracted cones, three or four inches long, with their shell-like scales, are a constant adornment.