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Updated: June 11, 2025
Now I find myself encircled by radiant groups of picturesque coral islands, all covered with palm-trees, whose waving branches are entwined with varied-hued passion-flowers. Lilies and ferns, narcissi and irises, are intermingled in one chaos of beauty, skirting the velvet sward that runs down to the water's edge.
She looked meditative. "I am not sure I like that title so well!" she said surveying him archly under the shadow of her long lashes; "Indeed if you were not Crown Prince, I should not like it at all!" Prince Humphry smiled, and tenderly touched the scarlet passion-flowers in her hair. "But as I am Crown Prince, you will try to put up with it, my Gloria!" and he kissed her again.
It is like an Aztec revel for its flowers: the great stairways, leading up and down between the rooms that glow with light and resound with the tones of flute and violin, are wound with shrubs where art conceals everything but the branch and blossom; doors are arched with palms and long banana leaves; flowers swing from lintel and window and bracket, stream from the pictures, crown the statues; sprays of dropping vines wreathe the chandeliers that shed the soft brilliance of wax-lights around them; mantels are covered with moss; tables are bedded with violets; tall vases overflow with roses and heliotropes, with cold camellias and burning geraniums; the orchestra is hidden with latticed bloom and bud; and yellow acacias and scarlet passion-flowers and a great white orchid with a honeyed breath encircle the fern-filled basin where a fountain plays.
The edges were wrought with seed-pearls, and fringed with Valenciennes lace and bullion. The walls were hung with cloth of silver, embroidered with gold figures, over which were worked pomegranates, polyanthuses, and passion-flowers, in ruby, amethyst, and smaragd. The drops of dew which the artificer had sprinkled on the flowers were diamonds.
The afternoon afforded a succession of the same sandy riverbanks, dressed with reeds, false maize, calceolarias and purple passion-flowers, and yielding for sole booty a brace of wild black ducks, and an opossum holding in her pouch five saucy and scolding little ones.
Whitewashed outer walls with a zinc roof are not uncommon, and they make a bald and hideous combination until kindly, luxuriant Nature has had time to step in and cover up man's ugly handiwork with her festoons of roses and passion-flowers. Most of the houses have, fortunately, red-tiled roofs, which are not so ugly, and mine is among the number.
Strange vines and flowers hung overhead; banks of azaleas, ruddy, white, and purple, bloomed in one place; roses of every hue turned their lovely faces to the sun; ranks of delicate ferns, and heaths with their waxen bells, were close by; glowing geraniums and stately lilies side by side; savage-looking scarlet flowers with purple hearts, or orange spikes rising from leaves mottled with strange colors; dusky passion-flowers, and gay nasturtiums climbing to the roof.
Variegated Passion-Flowers were conspicuous on the bare white sand that checkered the ground, displaying their emblematic forms on their low repent vines, and reminding the wanderer in these almost trackless solitudes of that Faith which was founded on humility and crowned with martyrdom.
"Oh, we can't put in any more, sir." "What? Why not? I particularly want two of those wild vines to be put in." "Did put 'em in before you come out this morning, sir, and the 'suckle and passion-flowers too. They'll be up a-top of the roof before we know where we are." My father looked pleased, and turned to examine the young plants that had been set.
'Tis a dull and ominous eve!" ... and a slight shudder ran through his delicate frame, as he turned toward the white-pillared loggia garlanded with its climbing vines, roses, and passion-flowers, through which there now floated a dim golden, suffused radiance reflected from lamps lit within, . . "I would the night were past and that the new day had come!"
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