Page:The black tulip (IA 10892334.2209.emory.edu).pdf/68

 which could easily be surveyed by the telescope. Boxte allowed his bulbs to rot in the pits, his seedlings to dry up in their cases, and his tulips to wither in the borders, and henceforward occupied himself with nothing else but the doings at Van Baerle’s.

But the most curious part of the operations was not performed in the garden.

It might be one o’clock in the morning, when Van Baerle went up to his laboratory, into the glazed cabinet whither Boxtel’s telescope had such easy access; and here, as soon as the lamp illuminated the walls and windows, Boxtel saw the inventive genius of his rival at work.

He beheld him sifting his seeds, and soaking them in liquids which were destined to modify or to deepen their colours. He knew what Cornelius meant, when, heating certain grains, then moistening them, then combining them with others by a sort of grafting-a minute and marvellously-delicate manipulation—he shut up in darkness those which were expected to furnish the black colour; exposed to the sun or to the lamp those which were to produce red; and placed between the endless reflection of two water-mirrors those intended for white, the pure representation of the limpid element.

This innocent magic, the fruit at the same time of childlike musings and of manly genius—this patient untiring labour, of which Boxtel knew himself to be incapable—made him, gnawed as he was with envy, centre all his life, all his thoughts, and all his hopes, in his telescope.

For, strange to say, the love and interest of horticulture, had not deadened in Isaac his fierce envy and thirst of revenge. Sometimes, whilst covering Van Baerle with his telescope, he deluded himself into a