ldren, and for that
reason must always seem more vivid and more natural than any other
tints, even after the child's mind has realised that they offer no
gratification to the appetite, and have not been selected by the
dressmaker. And, indeed, I had felt at once, as I had felt before
the white blossom, but now still more marvelling, that it was in no
artificial manner, by no device of human construction, that the festal
intention of these flowers was revealed, but that it was Nature herself
who had spontaneously expressed it (with the simplicity of a woman from
a village shop, labouring at the decoration of a street altar for some
procession) by burying the bush in these little rosettes, almost too
ravishing in colour, this rustic 'pompadour.' 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. Suddenly I stood still, unable
to move, as happens when something appears that requires not only our
eyes to take it in, but involves a deeper kind of perception and takes
possession of the whole of our being. A little girl, with fair, reddish
hair, who appeared to be returning from a walk, and held a trowel in her