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The arbor-vitae along the banks marked tracery more delicate than any ever wrought by deftest craftsman in western window of an antique fane. Brighter and richer than any tints that ever poured through painted oriel flowed the glories of sunset. Dear, pensive glooms of nightfall drooped from the zenith slowly down, narrowing twilight to a belt of dying flame.

It was like driving through a succession of gardens: roses were hanging over the fences in the richest profusion, and the arbor-vitae was ornamenting every little nook, and adorning every cottage. "Natchez stands on a high bluff, very romantic in appearance; jagged and rugged, as if volcanoes had been at work in a time long past, for tall trees grew in the ravines.

As the years went on, the arbor-vitae hedge got each season a new growth and waxed taller, until Evelina could no longer be seen above it. That was an annoyance to people, because the quiet mystery of her life kept their curiosity alive, until it was in a constant struggle, as it were, with the green luxuriance of the hedge. "John Darby had ought to trim that hedge," they said.

Now voices were audible laughing, sweet, clear, girls' voices, ringing like a chime of silver bells, as the owners came along the well-beaten path, and suddenly appeared around an arbor-vitae clump. "Here they are!" announced the professor, whose red and white toboggan-cap looked very jaunty, indeed. He told of the girls' arrival to a boy who was toiling up the edge of the packed and icy slide.

Yet they seemed to assume a sort of fantastic kindred with the objects to which they adhered: thus, on the leaves of spruce-trees and on delicate lichens they seemed like reduplications of the original growth, and they made the broad, fiat leaves of the arbor-vitae fully twice as wide as before.

I hired a man with plow and horse for a day or two and we made a path from the piazza to the road, set out an arbor-vitae hedge, made two or three small flower-beds, and had the kitchen-garden ploughed. The man planted the potatoes and corn in a field next the garden, but the kitchen garden was my hobby, and with all the enthusiasm of a child with a new toy I took personal possession of it.

The words "Cafe de la Paix" were over the door, brilliantly painted in yellow on a green ground, at each end of which rose pyramids of tricolored billiard-balls. The window-sashes, painted green, had small panes of the commonest glass. A dozen arbor-vitae, which ought to be called cafe-trees, stood to the left and right in pots, and presented their usual pretensions and sickly appearance.

Be it said, in understanding of the subject, that there are naturally dwarf forms of many plants, and probably all ordinary plants are capable of producing them. Thus there are very compact condensed forms of arbor-vitae, Norway spruce, peach-tree. These have originated as seed sports and are multiplied by cuttings.

It was really the first good opportunity that Dorothy had had to see the glories of the Maine woods, but what were they to her to-day? What mattered the long lines of spruce, the dainty larch, or the tangled arbor-vitae, to her now? To all Cologne's enthusiastic efforts to point out these beauties, as well as to distract Dorothy, she only answered with the most vague acquiescence.

Behind it the land opens out and falls away in a barren tract known from the earliest period as the Great Pastures, where a solitude reigns almost as complete as that of the primitive settlement, and where, swinging cabalistic webs from one to another of the arbor-vitae and dwarf-pine trees that grow upon it, spiders enough still abide to furnish familiars for a world full of witches.