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Matchless orchids clung to the trees, and the delicate maiden-hair fern held its own with the hardier varieties. Dusky fir-trees, groups of Australian araucarias, and Japanese oak trees and chestnuts set off the brightness of the flower beds.
Fan, and gloves, and little lacy handkerchief lay side by side on the pillows; little satin shoes stood at a jaunty angle, the crystal buckles shining in the sun. The pearl necklace, which had been a present from dad on her twenty-first birthday, lay on the toilet-table ready to be snapped on, and a spray of white roses and maiden-hair floated in a basin of water.
Immense ramifications they are great dark halls, roofed au naturel in corrugated rock with fissured sides, where maiden-hair fern hangs cool and green.
There were maiden-hair ferns among them too! and the biggest lichens you ever saw on the fence, while in the hollow of a rotten rail a little chippy bird always built a hair nest. She got the hairs at our barn, for most of them were gray from our carriage horses, Ned and Jo.
"Iddio mio!" she said, "but the Virgin will keep the dearest Signora Maynardi. Biagio and I have vowed to keep a candle always burning for her in Ara Coeli! The dearest, most beautiful of Signoras;" and Anita walked disconsolately on, down the stairs. I found Dora kneeling before the "gold table," arranging great masses of maiden-hair fern around the wood carving and in the shelf below.
With the singing of brooks, I heard the twitter of little birds, the rustle of leaves on the trees, and saw the maiden-hair nodding in the glen. I was a little child far away in the Badger State. Again I was rambling through green fields, and plucking the pretty wild flowers. How sweet and tender the blue skies above! How gentle the far-away voice of my mother as she called me!
Immediately above the village is a much larger cavern 72 feet high and 36 feet deep. It is vaulted like a dome, and tendrils of ivy and vine hang down draping the entrance. Violets grow in purple masses at the opening, and maiden-hair fern luxuriates within.
We approach it through a double avenue of tall Italian pines, and after a little while go out once more for a ramble up some quaint old brick steps, and so through a beautiful glen all fringed and feathered with fresh young fronds of maiden-hair ferns, and masses of hydrangea bushes, which must be beautiful as a poet's dream when they are covered with their great bunches of pale blue blossom.
Large boulders, imbedded in dark-coloured earth, lay on the steep slopes, and about these grew small herbaceous ferns in the greatest variety and profusion a very paradise for a fern-collector. In some parts a light green maiden-hair fern covered the ground with its beautifully tender foliage, reminding me of shady banks in the north of England, covered with the equally lovely oak-fern.
And a place like this ought at least to smell deliciously of roast and boiled. Instead of which it might as well be the chapel." Sissy gazed up at the wall: "There's some maiden-hair! How was it I never saw it this morning? Surely, we came along the top and looked down into this place." "No," said Archie. "That was the chapel we looked into. Didn't I say they were just alike?"
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