United States or Saint Martin ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
He was thinking of the child that had been stolen from him in her infancy the sweet little babe with the large blue eyes and shining rings of golden hair. He saw Pluma and Rex greeting some new arrivals out on the flower-bordered terrace, but he did not stop until he had reached his own apartments. He did not send for Pluma, to divulge the wonderful discovery he had made.
It was surrounded on three sides by woods, and opened on the fourth into a wild mountain gorge, choked up with rocks, logs, and a dense growth of underbrush and weeds. A clear cold stream tumbled in a succession of tinkling cascades down the dark ravine, and ran in a sandy flower-bordered channel through the grassy glade, until it disappeared in the encircling forest.
Wooded Island, at the south end, seems quite alive with moving forms; and I saunter over the first bridge, cross the tiny island of the hunters' camp and Australian squatters' hut, cross a second picturesque bridge, and begin to examine the faces moving about the flower-bordered paths, thronging the rhododendron exhibit, and resting upon the scattered benches.
All of which delighted the already joyous Sundown. He saw before him a flower-bordered pathway to his happiness, and incidentally, as he gazed down the pathway toward the gate of Chico Miguel's homestead, he saw Anita standing pensively beneath the shade of an acacia, pulling a flower to pieces and casting quick glances at the house.
They walked on for awhile along one of the narrow flower-bordered paths. "Would you care to go into the orangery?" he said. "There is not much to see there now, for all the orange-trees are out of doors. Still, it is a quaint, pretty old building."
All life was concentrated around the interior, the central patio, rich and magnificent, adorned with fish ponds, statues and flower-bordered beds. Marble was rare. The columns constructed of bricks were covered with a stucco that offered a fine surface for painting. Pompeii had been a polychrome city. All the columns, red or yellow, had capitals of divers colors.
The next moment the Man-Who-Makes-Faces dashed suddenly aside to a nearby flower-bordered square of packed ground over which, blazing with lights, hung one huge tree. Under the tree was a high, broad bill-board, a squat stool, and two short-legged tables. The little old gentleman began to bang his furniture about excitedly. "The tables are turned!" he shouted. "The tables are turned!"
It makes one think the more cheerfully of human life to see such a bright universal verdure; such sweet, rural, peaceful, flower-bordered cottages, not cottages of gentility, but dwellings of the laboring poor; such nice villas along the roadside, so tastefully contrived for comfort and beauty, and adorned more and more, year after year, with the care and after-thought of people who mean to live in them a great while, and feel as if their children might live in them also, and so they plant trees to overshadow their walks, and train ivy and all beautiful vines up against their walls, and thus live for the future in another sense than we Americans do.
I should be loath to say good-by forever to the Bois de Boulogne. I want to come back to Paris. I always want to come back to Paris. One needs not to make an apology or give a reason. "We turn rather sadly away from Pré Catalan and the Café Cascade. We glide adown the flower-bordered path and out from the clusters of Chinese lanterns, and leave the twinkling groves to their music and merry-making.
Without further explanation, Sundown stalked to the stable and got his horse. He came to the hacienda and made his adieux. Then he mounted and rode slowly down the roadway toward the gate. Anita's curiosity had overcome her timidity. Quite accidentally she stood toying with a bud that she had picked from the flower-bordered roadway.
Word Of The Day