' High up on the branches,
like so many of those tiny rose-trees, their pots concealed in jackets of
paper lace, whose slender stems rise in a forest from the altar on the
greater festivals, a thousand buds were swelling and opening, paler in
colour, but each disclosing as it burst, as at the bottom of a cup of pink
marble, its blood-red stain, and suggesting even more strongly than the
full-blown flowers the special, irresistible quality of the hawthorn-tree,
which, wherever it budded, wherever it was about to blossom, could bud and
blossom in pink flowers alone. Taking its place in the hedge, but as
different from the rest as a young girl in holiday attire among a crowd of
dowdy women in everyday clothes, who are staying at home, equipped and
ready for the 'Month of Mary,' of which it seemed already to form a part,
it shone and smiled in its cool, rosy garments, a Catholic bush indeed,
and altogether delightful.
The hedge allowed us a glimpse, inside the park, of an alley bordered with
jasmine, pansies, and verbenas, among which the stocks held open their
fresh plump purses, of a pink as fragrant and as faded as old Spanish
leather, while on the gravel-path a long watering-pipe, painted green,
coiling across the ground, poured, where its holes were, over the flowers
whose perfume those holes inhaled, a vertical and prismatic fan of
infinitesimal, rainbow-coloured drops.
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