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There are the violets that come so early in the spring, with their wildwood fragrance and dainty blue cloaks, and the lovely roses of summer, the goldenrods and asters of autumn, while among the rarer kinds we have the night-blooming cereus, the beautiful but slow blossoming century plant, and many others. These are types and symbols of ourselves and our process of birth and unfoldment.
There is no knowing what he might have said, but at that moment his mother noted the pressing necessity of wringing and mopping his nose, which she performed with such painful and conscientious singleness of purpose that Johnny set up a war-whoop like that of a night-blooming tomcat. It may be objected that this little tale is neither instructive nor amusing.
"No," he smiled, "you're a night-blooming cereus and so am I. You must remember that in this world the darkness was made for sleep, dawn for waking. The birds know that. So does Cleofonte. Therefore, you, too, child, shall sleep and at once." He raised the tarpaulin, scraped the ground free of twigs and stones, and then laid it back carefully, fetching his overcoat for a pillow.
Commander Lanigan, standing above them on a marble rail, his figure outlined against a pergola column, did his best to put some of his emotions into speech. He shouted, "Some night-blooming cereus, I'll tell the world!" The great doors swung open slowly. They remained open. Now curiosity replaced astonishment and held the rioters in their tracks; their mouths were wide, the voices mute.
With the vague feeling that the Park might prove more fruitful ground for the phenomenon, she moved to a front window, where she was not long unrewarded. If it was not the night-blooming cereus that drove up in the handsome, open automobile, turning into the Park, it was something equally portentous; for Mrs.
But when the violet writes a book on "Expression as I Have Found It," making laws for the evolution of beautiful blossoms, it leaves the Century Plant out of its equation, or else swears, i' faith, that a cactus is not a flower, and that a Night-Blooming Cereus is a disordered thought from a madman's brain.
She would have entered into the affairs of a wronged heroine with enthusiastic interest; but what was to be done with those of a possibly guilty one? She was so ready for the unexpected that as she stood at a back window, looking into the garden, it was almost a surprise not to find the night-blooming cereus really lifting its exotic head among the stout spring shoots of the peonies.
Each page is studded with five stars, each as unique as the century-flower, and, like the night-blooming cereus, "the perfume and suppliance of a minute" ipsa varietate variora. The mind of Shakespeare was bodied forth as Montezuma was apparelled, whose costume, however gorgeous, was never twice the same.
The odor of rotting vegetation, mingled with the insistent perfume of the strange night-blooming flowers, was borne in through the open window. In the center of the floor, beside an overturned sarcophagus, lay a figure in a neutral-colored dressing-gown, face downwards, and arms thrust forward and over the side of the ancient Egyptian mummy case. My friend advanced and knelt beside the dead man.
The night-blooming cereus abounds, opening just at sunset, and closing again at break of day. The outside leaves of this poetical flower are of a pale green, the inner ones of a pure wax-like white, and the petals light yellow. Complete, it is about eight inches long, and from twelve to fifteen in circumference.
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