Even Felipe, who thought
himself, from his vantage-post of observation on the veranda, and from
his familiar relation with Ramona, well informed of most that happened,
would have been astonished to hear all that Margarita could have
told him. In the first days Ramona herself had guilelessly told him
much,--had told him how Alessandro, seeing her trying to sprinkle and
bathe and keep alive the green ferns with which she had decorated the
chapel for Father Salvierderra's coming, had said: "Oh, Senorita, they
are dead! Do not take trouble with them! I will bring you fresh ones;"
and the next morning she had found, lying at the chapel door, a pile of
such ferns as she had never before seen; tall ones, like ostrich-plumes,
six and eight feet high; the feathery maidenhair, and the gold fern, and
the silver, twice as large as she ever had found them. The chapel was
beautiful, like a conservatory, after she had arranged them in vases and
around the high candlesticks.

It was Alessandro, too, who had picked up in the artichoke-patch all
of the last year's seed-vessels which had not been trampled down by the
cattle, and bringing one to her, had asked shyly if she did not think
it prettier than flowers made out of paper. His people, he said, made
wreaths of them. And so they were, more beautiful than any paper flowers
which ever were made,--great soft round disks of fine straight threads
like silk, with a kind of saint's halo around them of sharp, stiff
points, glossy as satin, and of a lovely creamy color. It was the
strangest thing in the world nobody had ever noticed them as they lay
there on the ground. She had put a great wreath of them around Saint
Joseph's head, and a bunch in the Madonna's hand; and when the Senora
saw them, she exclaimed in admiration, and thought they must have been
made of silk and satin.

And Alessandro had brought her beautiful baskets, made by the Indian
women at Pala, and one which had come from the North, from the Tulare
country; it had gay feathers woven in with the reeds,--red and yellow,
in alternate rows, round and round. It was like a basket made out of a
bright-colored bird.

And a beautiful stone bowl Alessandro had brought her, glossy black,
that came all the way from Catalina Island; a friend of Alessandro's got
it. For the first few weeks it had seemed as if hardly a day passed
that there was not some new token to be chronicled of Alessandro's
thoughtfulness and good-will. Often, too,