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In August, after a lapse of four years, Burton renewed acquaintance with Isabel Arundell, who one day met him, quite by accident, in the Botanical Gardens, and she kept meeting him there quite by accident every day for a fortnight. He had carried his life in his hand to Mecca and to Harar, he had kept at bay 200 Somalis, but like the man in Camoens, he finally fell by "a pair of eyes."
Some fine mansions, the chief guard-house, the theatre, the chief coffee-houses and inns, the academy of the fine arts, and the building belonging to the botanical garden, the two last commonly known by the name of "Charlottenburg," are among the ornaments of this magnificent square, in the midst of which stands a beautiful monument, representing Christian V. on horseback, and surrounded by several figures.
In five minutes Carl had found a friend and the Dean a helper. He had been commissioned to write a book on the plants of the Holy Land and had collected a botanical library for the purpose, but the work lagged. Here now was the one who could help set it going. That day Linnæus left his attic room and went to live in the Dean's house. His days of starvation were over.
To the Anglo-Saxon the life that is led in it seems a good deal like walking about in a botanical garden during the day and sleeping in an observatory at night a decidedly artificial existence; but so long as we must drink or be amused at all, we shall do well to study the ways of the French. They alone know how to eat and drink properly and amuse themselves in a rational way.
During the few days I stayed in Buitenzorg, the botanical gardens were a source of ever new delight. It was in the latter half of November and thus well into the rainy season. Usually showers came every afternoon, but the mornings, even up to eleven o'clock, always appeared like spring-time, only in a more magnificent edition than that of temperate zones.
He annotated the volumes that he read with judgment; he kept botanical calendars and thermometrical registers; he had a lively curiosity all round; and, in Gray's own words, he deemed it a sufficient object of his studies to know, wherever he was, what lay within reach that was worth seeing whether building, ruin, park, garden, prospect, picture, or monument to whom it had ever belonged, and what had been the characteristic and taste of different ages.
As an illustration of this, I may tell here that I breathed sea-air on the Firth of Forth, in Scotland, while a boy; then was taken to Wisconsin, where I remained nineteen years; then, without in all this time having breathed one breath of the sea, I walked quietly, alone, from the middle of the Mississippi Valley to the Gulf of Mexico, on a botanical excursion; and while in Florida, far from the coast, my attention wholly bent on the splendid tropical vegetation about me, I suddenly recognized a sea-breeze, as it came sifting through the palmettos and blooming vine-tangles, which at once awakened and set free a thousand dormant associations, and made me a boy again in Scotland, as if all the intervening years had been annihilated.
We carried a large piece of ice down to Arzier in a botanical tin, and on our arrival there we found that all traces of external lines had disappeared. This visit to the glacière was on Saturday, and on the following Monday I determined to go up alone, to take a registering thermometer, and leave it in the cave for the night; which, of course, would entail a third visit on the next day.
Perhaps she was surprised at his lack of botanical knowledge, he asked so many questions. But it was not the flowers, it was her voice, which urged him to these interrogations. They were on the point of re-entering the reception chamber, when the jingle of a spur on the mosaic floor caused them to turn. Maurice could not control the start; he had forgotten all about Beauvais.
He inspected the plant and tested it, but found it was not included in his botanical system; and he could not possibly find out to what class it belonged. "That must be some subordinate species," he said. "I don't know it. It's not included in any system." "Not included in any system!" repeated the thistles and the nettles.
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