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Inside the wicket stood a single ancient house, uninhabited, and festooned with ivy into a thing more bush than house; though a small Tudor window peeped from the leaves, like the little suspicious eye of some shaggy beast.

The gayest kinds of designs were used in the silks and brocades; ribbons and bow-knots and interlacing stripes with flowers and rustic symbols scattered over them. Curtains were less festooned and cut with great exactness. The canopies of beds became smaller, until often only a ring or crown held the draperies, and it became the fashion to place the bed sideways, "vu de face."

As you leave Quebec, with its mural-crowned and castled rock, and drop down the stately river, presently the snowy fall of Montmorenci, far back in its purple hollow, leaps perpetual avalanche into the abyss, and then you are abreast of the beautiful Isle of Orleans, whose low shores, with their expanses of farmland, and their groves of pine and oak, are still as lovely as when the wild grape festooned the primitive forests and won from the easy rapture of old Cartier the name of Isle of Bacchus.

From time to time the highways along which the two friends rode at leisure on their way to Andernach, led them over the crest of some granite hill that was higher than the rest. Thence, through a clearing of the forest or cleft in the rocky barrier, they caught sudden glimpses of the Rhine framed in stone or festooned with vigorous vegetation.

Its trailing roots were festooned with clinging sea-weed and the long, snaky, undulating stems of the sea-turnip; and fixed between two crossing roots was a bamboo orange crate, almost intact. As he walked toward it he heard a strange cry, unlike anything the barren sands had borne before.

Willows, drooping over the stream, were festooned with recent drift, hanging many feet above the level of the banks; and it was evident that the waters had lately been out, to the overflowing of the country for many miles. The river, now upwards of 2200 feet above the level of the ocean forms, in this quarter, the nominal boundary of the kingdom of Shoa.

A giant forest now replaces the stunted and bushy timber of the Terai proper and clothes the steep mountain-sides with dense, deep-green, dripping vegetation. The trees are of great height, and are sheathed and festooned with climbing plants of many kinds. Bauhinias and robinias, like huge cables, join tree to tree.

There was also a room over this from which you could get outside and regulate the small spiny-looking wheel at the top so as to gain all the force of the wind. All these rooms were festooned with cobwebs quite white with flour. The spiders were white, too, which made them look larger. Even the mice caught in the traps were white with flour.

The picturesque dwelling of the bonde was white in every part, and fringed with long icicles, icicles drooped from its sheltering porch and gabled windows the deserted dove-cote on the roof was a miniature ice-palace, curiously festooned with thin threads and crested pinnacles of frozen snow. Within the house there was silence, the silence of approaching desolation.

In the third parlor from the ceiling were suspended ropes or garlands of smilax and bride's roses, which formed a dainty canopy. White satin ribbons festooned on two rows of potted marguerites made a bridal pathway direct from the foot of the stairway to the dais beneath the canopy.