eked out the occasional tins of cigarettes in which
Degas indulged, and always the flame-colored little buck-peppers
lightened up the shadows of the _benab_, as hot to the palate as their
color to the eye.

One day just as I was leaving, Grandmother led me to a palm nearby,
and to one of its ancient frond-sheaths was fastened a small brown
branch to which a few blue-green leaves were attached. I had never
seen anything like it. She mumbled and touched it with her shriveled,
bent fingers. I could understand nothing, and sent for Degas, who came
and explained grudgingly, "Me no know what for--_toko-nook_ just
name--have got smell when yellow." And so at last I found the bit of
uselessness, which, carried onward and developed in ages to come, as
it had been elsewhere in ages past, was to evolve into botany, and
back-yard gardens, and greenhouses, and wars of roses, and beautiful
paintings, and music with a soul of its own, and verse more than
human. To Degas the _toko-nook_ was "just name," "and it was nothing
more." But he was forgiven, for he had all unwittingly sowed the seeds
of religion, through faith in his glowing caladiums. But Grandmother,
though all the sunlight seemed dusk, and the dawn but as night, yet
clung to her little plant, whose glory was that it was of no use
whatsoever, but in months to come would be yellow, and would smell.

Farther down river, in the small hamlets of the bovianders--the people
of mixed blood--the practical was still necessity, but almost every
thatched and wattled hut had its swinging orchid branch, and perhaps a
hideous painted tub with picketed rim, in which grew a golden splash
of croton. This ostentatious floweritis might furnish a theme for a
wholly new phase of the subject--for in almost every respect these
people are less worthy human beings--physically, mentally and
morally--than the Indians. But one cannot shift literary overalls for
philosophical paragraphs in mid-article, so let us take the little
river steamer down stream for forty miles to the coast of British
Guiana, and there see what Nature herself does in the way of gardens.
We drive twenty miles or more before we reach Georgetown, and the
sides of the road are lined for most of the distance with huts and
hovels of East Indian coolies and native Guiana negroes. Some are made
of boxes, others of bark, more of thatch or rough-hewn boards and
barrel staves, and some of split bamboo. But they resemble one
another in s