Oldal 452 [452]
OCR
—— e EE a es ee ne ENmzt ZET Oy! Thee VLE DMO ME) SECTION SS = —$$ TELET me — e —= give the impression of individual flowers so much as a profusion of color—color that fills the artist in you with delight! Beds of indigo and topaz; masses of orange, shading to cream; beds filled with branching candelabra of red gold. Carpets of pansies, purple and mauve; white clematis above, waving its star-sprinkled sprays with the wind, and thorny vines with vermilion buds tangling behind white lilies; immense hydrangeas, tinted like diatoms; long avenues of pink gladioli stretching away to the west. On days like these, the hazy mountains look perfectly enormous and give you a strange uplifting-of-the-spirit sensation. An hour later I drag my eyes away from them, for the advance of the morning brings many important occupations. There are my old friends, the fruit trees, that must be visited; to dispute the bees’ title to the softest seckel pears, to find the first ripe figs, to waylay ‘‘Kritty,’’ the pretty octoroon, as she passes through with a tray of purple grapes—and to eat of these fruits under the mimosa tree. [here are three of these mimosas, a large young one, which is the daughter of this older, and a tiny one, surely its grandchild. Every year I plan to adopt the grandchild mimosa and carry it home to Richmond to raise—but it is there still. Finally, the garden-builder herself comes out to join me, accompanied now like the delightful Elizabeth in her German garden, by three babies, their laughter tinkling through the box-bushes even before they appear. A moment later, perhaps, with dimpled arms outstretched and squeals of excitement, they chase, toddle and tumble after, but never overtake, the bright-hued butterflies, flying in and out among the flowers, while the mother sits down to her knitting by me. Nothing can surpass the Bloomfield garden now! A few locusts may be singing, ‘Good-bye, Summer’’; a dead leaf falling may remind the rest they will not be here always—but “‘let their loveliness fade as it will,’ for this immediate moment it is flawless, no flower fears the frost and every vine ‘‘entwines itself verdantly still.”’ NAN Maury LIGHTFOOT. [279]
