Page:Garshin - A Red Flower (1911).djvu/25

Rh while in the centre flaunted a large and uncommonly yellow dahlia with red speckles. This flower really marked the centre of the whole garden, lifting itself above it, and the fact could not pass unnoticed that the inmates paid it some mysterious tribute. To the new patient it also seemed out of the ordinary, as some sort of a palladium of the garden and building.

All paths were similarly planted by the hands of the inmates. Here were found all the flowers usually seen in the gardens of Little Russia—tall rose-mallows, the tobacco plant, with its small, pink flowers; mint, violets, nasturtium and poppy. Here also, approaching the high steps of the entrance, grew two little bushes of poppy of some peculiar species. They were much smaller than that of the ordinary type, and they also differed in the unusual brightness of their red. This was the flower which so impressed the patient when he first gazed into the garden through the glass door.

Entering the garden for the first time, his eye fell immediately on these bright flowers. There were only two of them. By some chance they grew apart from the others on an uncultivated spot, so that dense weeds