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Updated: May 2, 2025
The spacious dwelling, gay with its brightly painted lattice shutters, dainty scroll-work, and colonnades of wooden pillars, rose against the sombre woods, and he wondered with some anxiety whether Mrs. Acton had many guests in it. He had no desire to fall in with any strangers, for he was worn out and aching, and he still wore the old duck clothing in which he had left the cañon.
Still, one moonlight evening, when Alton waited upon its verandah, cigar in hand, the house stood upon the hillside, picturesque with its painted scroll-work, green shutters, colonnades of cedar pillars, and broad verandahs. Its owner was an Englishman who had prospered in the Dominion, and combined the kindliness he still retained for his countrymen with the lavish hospitality of the West.
In the handicrafts there were a photographic reproduction of the Lord's Prayer, illustrated originally by a penman with uncommon genius for scroll-work; a group of water-lilies in wax, floating on a mirror-lake and protected by a glass globe; a full-rigged schooner, built cunningly inside a bottle by a matricide serving a life-sentence in the penitentiary at San Quinten; and a mechanical canarybird in a gilded cage, acquired at the Philadelphia Centennial, a bird that had carolled its death lay in the early winter of 1877 when it was wound up too hard and its little insides snapped.
Her outer dress was of bright, dark green, with a scarlet line round the rim; inside she was pure white. A little railing of delicate iron scroll-work ran round her stern, and across it curved a board, with the boat's name in scarlet and gold: The Belle of Canada.
There was also a two-decker pulpit at the east end and over the dim little altar hung an escutcheon of Royal George the lion and the unicorn fighting for the crown amid much scroll-work. Like most churches on the Marsh it was much too big for its parish, and if the entire population of Brodnyx and Pedlinge had flocked into it, it would not have been full.
In the German quarter, to the north, one felt a sort of ornamental bleakness if the expression may be permitted: the tenements here were clean and not too crowded, the scroll-work on their superimposed porches, like that decorating the Turnverein and the stem Lutheran Church, was eloquent of a Teutonic inheritance: The Belgians were to the west, beyond the base-ball park and the car barns, their grey houses scattered among new streets beside the scarred and frowning face of Torrey's hill.
On the arch over the entrance to the staircase projects the head of Sigelgaita, wife of Niccola Rufolo, the donor of the pulpit to the church, sculptured in the style of the Roman decadence, between two profile medallions in low relief. The material of the whole is fair white marble, enriched with mosaics, and wrought into beautiful scroll-work of acanthus leaves and other Romanesque adornments.
Here, seated upon an extemporised throne, and with his feet resting upon a footstool of solid gold, massively chiselled in an elaborate and particularly graceful scroll-work pattern, hastily brought in from the imperial litter, he presently received not only Umu, the captain of the royal bodyguard, but also some half-dozen other nobles who had come from the City of the Sun to pay their homage to their re-incarnated Lord and Sovereign, Manco Capac.
The inspiration of the patterns, whether on wood or skin, may be found in the spirals of sea-shells, the tracery on the skin of lizards and the bark of trees, and even, it may be, in the curious fluting and natural scroll-work on the tall cliffs of the calcareous clay called papa.
Presently, by the side of the path, one comes to an object which seems romantically in keeping with the general character of the scene a long block of stone, lying among the grasses and the wild geraniums, on which, as one nears it, one descries carved scroll-work and quaint, deep-cut lettering. Is it the tomb of dead lovers, the memorial of some great deed, or an altar to the genius loci?
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