Page:Letters of Life.djvu/283

Rh, annihilated the grove, with its love-consecrated cloister, demolished the rich eastern garden, and with his fiery breath consumed a pair of ancient elms that guarded its entrance, full of vitality and glory. But I still keep the unchanged picture in my heart.

Our domain was beloved by the flowers. Roses of every hue and variety cast their perfume upon the air; the clematis threw over the piazzas its rich masses of cerulean blue; brilliant woodbines and trumpet honeysuckles spanned the arching gateways, or clung to the trellises of the summer-house; the alternate white and purple lilacs bowed their heads over the avenue allotted to them, as if in close consultation; the neighboring lilies bent back their listening petals, like the ears of the white rabbit; on the borders of the gravel walks the gorgeous coxcomb flaunted, the peony and lupine advanced their pretensions, the pansy lifted its deep eye of intelligence, and the arbor-Judea waved its pendulous banner when the slightest zephyr claimed homage.

Life in its varied forms, biped and quadrupedal, leaped and luxuriated among us. Birds, fearing no shaft of the fowler, peopled the boughs, and made a paradise of song. Among the lofty walnuts in the grove a race of exceedingly pretty gray squirrels might now and then be seen flitting from spray to spray, or gracefully grasping in their paws the nuts that they nibbled and amassed in their hoards. Snowy turkeys strutted amid the green turf, those of the masculine genus spreading