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Updated: May 19, 2025
Glancing up as he did so, he also glanced out of the window, to see what was going on in the garden. He always liked to keep in touch with the garden, and was on intimate terms with every bird and blossom in it. It was neither bird nor blossom that his eyes lighted on now. A young girl stood on the gravel-path, near his favourite syringa arbour.
Before them lay the broad valley, once a reedy morass, now reclaimed and partitioned out into garden lands; its margin fringed with long water-courses, overhung with grey willows and the dark green syringa.
At noon their mother kept them from running over to the old house lest they should be in the way; so they consoled themselves by going to the syringa bush at the corner and sniffing the savory odors which came from the kitchen, where Katy, the cook, was evidently making nice things for tea.
The heavy odors of wild honeysuckle, syringa, and ceanothus that hung over it were lightened and freshened by the sharp spicing of pine and bay. The mountain breeze which sometimes shook the serrated tops of the large redwoods above with a chill from the remote snow peaks even in the heart of summer, never reached the little valley. It seemed an ideal place for a picnic.
Here a climbing syringa brought from the romantic Borda gardens in Mexico, where the sad Empress Carlota used to walk, flung out its tendrils gaily to the salt sea breeze, and seemed never to miss the kindlier sun of its former home. At one side there was a small cemented pool, the birds' drinking-place, where many of the little creatures came to dip their bills and trill their morning songs.
Mingling with the sound of the piano was the droning hum of a foolish bee, who had got on the wrong side of the window and was now making vain efforts to fly home again through the glass. A delicious scent came from somewhere perhaps from the syringa bushes growing just outside the open window. Mollie's lazy eyelids fell over her eyes "Just five minutes " "Five minutes," said the clock.
And though the sky was dull and grey, still the whole air was so full of summer, so rich in the promise of what the next day would be, that you did not marvel to hear the birds singing as merrily as if it had been sunshine. There was one thrush to which Olive had stood listening for half-an-hour. He sat sheltered in the heart of the great syringa bush.
My great-uncle was in most comfortable circumstances, and kept his own brougham and peach- houses before the failure of the Glasgow Bank. They removed to Syringa Villas after that, and did the washing at home. I shall never forget calling upon Emma the first Tuesday that the clothes were hanging out to dry in the back garden, and finding her in tears, with the blinds drawn down.
Adone also had a voice as sweet as a nightingale in the syringa bushes in May; and it pierced the gloom of the old naked gaunt church as a nightingale's thrills through the dark hour before dawn.
And it may be there will be a syringa bush in the background, not that the Parsonage Aid Society is partial to this flower, but because it is not easily killed by neglect. They choose the hardiest, ugliest known shrubs for the parsonage yard because they last best.
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