tiful in her search after emotions. A
sentiment for her surroundings came now as a matter of course. If she
turned, she beheld the chaparral plain stretching flatly back of her to
the sands and lagoons of the coast. If she flirted her whip overhead,
down hurtled a shower of bright yellow hail from the laden boughs. Her
nostrils told her of magnolias and orange blossoms; her eyes and ears,
of parrots and paroquets and every other conceit in fantastic plumage.
They were a restless kaleidoscope of colors blending with the foliage,
and from their turmoil they might have been quarreling myriads, and
never birds of a paradise. Little red monkeys grinned down at her as
they raced clutching among the branches, while a big bandy-legged sambo,
an exceedingly ill-tempered member of the same family, bawled his
reproaches in a tone gruesomely human. Now and then her horse reared
from an adder squirming underfoot, or she would see a torpid boa twined
sluggishly around a limb, as about a victim. Once in a jungle-like place
she experienced something akin to the prized ecstatic shudder as she
made out the sleek form of a jaguar slinking into the swamp. The ugliest
of the picturesque "properties" was a monstrous green iguana with his
prickly crest and horn and slimy eye, basking full five feet along a
rotten log.

But the things of horror merely gave to those of beauty a needed
contrast, and did not hurt the poetry in the least. They were every one
on the same grand, wild scale. As the palms, for instance, rising like
slender columns a hundred feet without a single branch. As yet other
palms, which were plumed at the summit like an ostrich wing; or as the
smaller ones at their base, spreading out into fans of emerald green.
Again, as the forest giants which far overhead were the arches of a
watercourse, like the nave of a Gothic cathedral. And even the parasite
vines were of the same Titan designing, for they bound the girders of
the vault in a dense mat of leaves and woven twigs, while underfoot the
carpet was soft inches deep with fern and moss. As for the
flowers--Jacqueline wanted to pluck them all, to wreathe the wondering
fawns, as ladies with picture hats do in the old frivolous rococo
fantasies. And as to that, she might have been one of those Watteau
ladies herself, so rich was the coloring there, and she in the
foreground so white, so soft of skin, so sylvan and aristocratic a
shepherdess.

And then it was a thing for wonderm