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He led the way to a distant arbour, overhung with a canopy of blood-red passion-flowers and girt about by design dangled from the clustering foliage in its roof. Within, directly under the beams, all by itself, on an upright chair beside a small table, sat an incongruous, startling, awe-inspiring apparition a grimy old man of Mongolian aspect.
"You do not know her name, Baron?" "She is the Chained Virgin of Saint Thorn, I tell you. She has no other name. She sits in a throne in choir, pale as milk, with burning grey eyes as big as passion-flowers! She is a chained Andromeda on the rock of Peter. Be my Perseus!" "Hum," said Galors, half to himself, "hum! Yes, I will go at once." "My dear friend " "Not a word more, Baron.
The second time he had exclaimed, "Ah, the syrups! the greengage! and the moonlight among the passion-flowers!" and had greeted her with effusion. But he had never come to call on her. She still felt a sort of fondness for him; but she understood that he was like a child who needed perpetual petting and did not care very much from whom it came.
There are hedges of pittosporum, arbors veiled by passion-flowers, and two of that most beautiful of all living trees, the araucaria, or Norfolk Island pine, one specimen being some eighty feet high, and said to be the tallest north of the equator.
"No," replied Giles; "these are for a blameless old gentleman that has passed a life of honest toil in the wholesale hardware business. Don't you think he's entitled to a few flowers by this time?" "What kind of flowers are they?" "Passion-flowers and camellias." "Humph! Do they grow round here?" "Hardly.
I sighed to myself, for it was so terrible that the beautiful little home should have been utterly destroyed; and it all seemed to come up before me with its high-pitched gable ends, the rough pine porch, the lead-paned windows that came over from England; and as I saw it all in imagination once more, I fancied how the passion-flowers and other creepers must have looked crisping and curling up as the flames reached them; and what with my miserable thoughts, the stiffness I felt from my previous day's exertions, and the pain from my little wound, if ever I had felt horribly depressed, I did then.
Some wore very pretty hats made from cane-tops, and trimmed with hibiscus blossoms or passion-flowers; others wore bright-coloured handkerchiefs, knotted lightly round their flowing hair, or wreaths of the Microlepia tenuifolia. Many had tied bandanas in a graceful knot over the left shoulder. All wore two, three, four, or even six beautiful leis, besides long festoons of the fragrant maile.
There were ferns of various descriptions in the forest, and many fine trees, entwined, supported, or suffocated by numerous climbing plants, amongst which were blue and lilac convolvulus, and magnificent passion-flowers.
A delightful residence was made of the house; it was raised a story, surrounded by a veranda, and half hidden under beautiful trees mimosas, fig-sycamores, bauhinias, and paullinias, whose trunks were invisible beneath a network of scarlet-flowered bromelias and passion-flowers.
She is delighted with the notion that her "Baltimore belles" and the like can clamber against the house without being torn away every two or three years for paint. On the strength of this notion, she has already ordered a big lot of all sorts of herbs and creeping things, from grape-vines and English ivy to sweet-peas and passion-flowers. That's only one thing.
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