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Updated: May 13, 2025
Imogen saw a latent boredom piercing Sir Basil's affability. Great truths uttered by some lips might be made to seem very unefficacious. She proposed to him that she should show him the wonderful display of mountain-laurel that grew higher up among the pine-woods. He rose with alacrity, but Mrs. Potts rose too.
Through blackberry brakes that tried to pluck me back, though I but strained towards fruitless growths of mountain-laurel; up slippery steeps to barren heights, where stood none to welcome. Fairy land not yet, thought I, though the morning is here before me.
Now I, by fasting seven days, and quenching my thirst with the dew of the mountain-laurel alone, shall, according to the word of my father, be enabled to see this earth tenanted by beautiful creatures; the seeds, which now lie dormant in the earth, will spring up to furnish food for innumerable creatures, and those innumerable creatures will enjoy the bounties spread out in such profusion before them!
All these pleasures will delight the eyes and ears of those who shall live on this beautiful world, when I shall have done what I conceive ought to have been done." So he commenced his fast. Seven days he ate no food, and quenched his thirst with only the dew which lay upon the mountain-laurel. Upon the morning of the eighth day he began his task.
Peering cautiously between the slender boles of crooked mountain-laurel bushes, he soon found a vantage point from which he could see on beyond the densely woven foliage, and, to his astonishment, found, before he had thought, possible that he had progressed so far, that he had already reached the place he sought.
There were the vine which never bore fruit, the dry cones of the pine, steeped in the dew that drops from the leaves of the mountain-laurel, the claws of the tiger, the teeth of the alligator, the thighbone of the tortoise, and the ribs of the snail, reduced to a powder, and mixed up with water dropped from the shell of the butternut, through the ochre of war.
And how expressive, novel, and eccentric are these social customs! The garden salvia, for instance, slaps the burly bumblebee upon the back and marks him for her own as he is ushered in to the feast. The mountain-laurel welcomes the twilight moth with an impulsive multiple embrace.
We saw many another wild volcanic cliff and fissure and cave on our two-days' tour round the island of Fayal; but it was most startling, when, on the first morning, as we passed from green valley to valley along the road, suddenly all verdure and life vanished, and we found ourselves riding through a belt of white, coarse moss stretching from mountain to sea, covering rock and wall and shed like snow or moonlight or mountain-laurel or any other pale and glimmering thing; and when, after miles of ignorant wonder, we rode out of it into greenness again, and were told that we had crossed what the Portuguese call a Misterio or Mystery, the track of the last eruption.
The family of the heath, cranberry, pyrola, Andromeda, and mountain-laurel how do these blossoms welcome their insect friends? This group is particularly distinguished by the unusual exception in the form of its anthers, which open by pores at their tips, instead of the ordinary side fissures. Seen thus in their detached condition, how incomprehensible and grotesque do they appear!
You might keep a plant of it in your hot-house, and it would blow I dare say; but it would never be half so lovely as my acres of them, and I guess it would only make you sad, seeing it so far from home, and pale and pining," answered Becky, with her eyes on the green slopes where the mountain-laurel braved the wintry snow, and came out fresh and early in the spring.
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