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In winter come the storms, and the great winds blow, but then will follow spring in all its beauty, adorning hill and plain with perfumed plants and red anemones, fair to see. Then will the birds trill out upon the branches their songs of joy, and sermonize in lilting tones from the pulpits of the trees.
Rare butterflies came before the snow was off, flaunting in the chill breeze, and looking forlorn and all astray, in spite of the magnificence of their dark velvet cloaks, with golden borders. The fields and wood-paths have as yet few charms to entice the wanderer. In a walk, the other day, I found no violets, nor anemones, nor anything in the likeness of a flower.
We gaze almost with awe at the lovely vision of a dainty Nautilus, sailing his fairy boat down a blue channel fringed with purple and salmon-coloured anemones, beneath a hedge of rosy coral.
When the grubs, pressed one against the other, with their heads downwards in the fetid soup, make an unbroken shoal, the sight of those breathing cups incessantly opening and closing, with a little clack like a valve, almost makes one forget the horrors of the charnel yard. It suggests a carpet of tiny Sea anemones. The maggot has its beauties after all.
Mother took her to the cold spring, and they did not return till just at dark, loaded with airy anemones and blue violets and a few columbines. They had found Mr. John King and his daughter at the spring, looking for wild-flowers, and mother introduced Miss Hawthorne; but she hung her head and scarcely answered, and did not open her lips again, though Mr. King accompanied them all the way home.
Upon his back he had slung his mandolin. Now the time of the year was Spring, not Spring as we know it in England, for it was but early March, but it was the time when Spring coming up out of Africa, or unknown lands to the south, first touches Spain, and multitudes of anemones come forth at her feet.
A long time passed and the girls still lingered. They discovered that most of the pools boasted anemones, some not unlike an ordinary land daisy with light-colored tentacles stretching ray- shaped from a yellow centre. When touched with an empty shell, the anemone would close over it, folding both the shell and itself into a tight brown ball, then open slowly and drop the shell.
But in historical records we find the curious statement that it took place after three years' work. This indicates a distinct plan, and the possibility of carrying it to a practical conclusion within a few years' time. Something more is known about other cases. Garden anemones, Anemone coronaria, are said to have become double in the first half of the last century in an English nursery.
What more natural than to imagine that the violets and the hyacinths, the roses and the anemones, sprang from their dust, were empurpled or incarnadined by their blood, and contained some portion of their spirit? "I sometimes think that never blows so red The Rose as where some buried Caesar bled; That every Hyacinth the Garden wears Dropt in her Lap from some once lovely Head.
"You see that bed of pink flowers over there, and those green rushes, and those fern-like plants? Well, they are all living polyps, or colonies of polyps, some kinds of which leave coral when they die, like the coral polyps proper. "As for the Anemones; those innocent looking flowers really possess powerful weapons in the shape of tiny lassos, which are concealed in lasso-cells.
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