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Updated: July 27, 2025
Lilac thunbergia wreaths over-arching boughs, and passion-flower flings white and crimson garlands over turf flushed with the pink blossoms of the sensitive plant. Gold mohur and red poinsettia blaze with fiery splendour, and huge crotons, with velvety leaves of pink, violet, and chocolate, grow to the height of forest trees.
In the late morning the boys brought in great loads of poinsettia, from which they fashioned brilliant rosettes and garlands for the church. At night, a wooden platform was brought in for a bed, upon which Louis, Manuel and I slept, while the others made a bed of broad boards upon the floor.
One glance, too, under the boughs of the great Cotton-tree at the gate, at the still sleeping sea, with one tall coolie ship at anchor, seen above green cane-fields and coolie gardens, gay with yellow Croton and purple Dracaena, and crimson Poinsettia, and the grand leaves of the grandest of all plants, the Banana, food of paradise.
The garden seemed a tangle of all manner of vegetation an oleander in bloom, a poinsettia, a yucca, lifting its spike of waxen white blossoms, a narrow flower-border in which the gardenias had become tall shrubs and the scented verbena shrubs almost trees. As for the blend of perfume, it was dreamily intoxicating.
There were hedges of geranium and poinsettia about the villa, pergolas hung with bougainvillea, numberless palms, and a very pleasant orange grove in good bearing; in the courtyard a bronze Venus rode on a sprouting whale, and there were many fountains; and within there was much white marble and pillars of precious stone, and horrible liverish Viennese mosaics, for the house was something of a prodigy, having been built in a trade boom by a rastaqouère.
Colour is given to this fringe by the magenta bougainvillea, the red hibiscus, the pale blue convolvulus, the variegated crotons, and the orange and red of the lantana, and at places the poinsettia provides a predominating red head to the hedge-like greenery.
Through the polished green of the surrounding palms and rubber-plants stared gardenias and camelias; below, between maidenhair and sword-ferns, winked the little waxen blossoms of fuchsias and begonias: at intervals poinsettia flared audaciously among its more quietly dressed neighbors; and, in the far corners the golden spheres were swelling to fairly respectable proportions on the branches of dwarf orange-trees.
But passing a patio where there was a poinsettia in brilliant bloom against the wall, we found ourselves in a variety store where there were Cordoveses of all colors; and we chose one of the right brown, with the picture of a beautiful Spanish girl, wearing a pink shawl, inside the crown which was fluted round in green and red ribbon.
Her cheeks matched the poinsettia, or Christmas flower, and her eyes were as blue as the sapphires in the jewel shops. With some slight agitation she entered Boardman's. It was in this store that the ring incident had occurred, and the thought of her experience was not exactly pleasant to the sensitive girl. "But I saw such pretty things in there," she insisted secretly.
Snatching up his weapons, he roared with anguish, and ran blindly forward along the trampled trail, ready to hurl himself upon the whole loathsome tribe. A gigantic leopard, crouching in a thicket of scarlet poinsettia beside the trail, made as if to pounce upon him as he went by but shrank back, instead, with flattened ears, daunted by his fury. But presently the madness burned itself out.
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