mic influence, as if their
habitual equilibrium had been changed. The plants themselves were
infected by a similar strange metamorphosis.

In the gardens and vegetable patches and orchards very curious
symptoms manifested themselves. Climbing plants climbed more
audaciously. Tufted plants became more tufted than ever. Shrubs
became trees. Cereals, scarcely sown, showed their little green
heads, and gained, in the same length of time, as much in inches
as formerly, under the most favourable circumstances, they had
gained in fractions. Asparagus attained the height of several
feet; the artichokes swelled to the size of melons, the melons to
the size of pumpkins, the pumpkins to the size of gourds, the
gourds to the size of the belfry bell, which measured, in truth,
nine feet in diameter. The cabbages were bushes, and the
mushrooms umbrellas.

The fruits did not lag behind the vegetables. It required two
persons to eat a strawberry, and four to consume a pear. The
grapes also attained the enormous proportions of those so well
depicted by Poussin in his "Return of the Envoys to the Promised
Land."

[Illustration: It required two persons to eat a strawberry]

It was the same with the flowers: immense violets spread the most
penetrating perfumes through the air; exaggerated roses shone
with the brightest colours; lilies formed, in a few days,
impenetrable copses; geraniums, daisies, camelias, rhododendrons,
invaded the garden walks, and stifled each other. And the
tulips,--those dear liliaceous plants so dear to the Flemish
heart, what emotion they must have caused to their zealous
cultivators! The worthy Van Bistrom nearly fell over backwards,
one day, on seeing in his garden an enormous "Tulipa gesneriana,"
a gigantic monster, whose cup afforded space to a nest for a
whole family of robins!

The entire town flocked to see this floral phenomenon, and
renamed it the "Tulipa quiquendonia".

But alas! if these plants, these fruits, these flowers, grew
visibly to the naked eye, if all the vegetables insisted on
assuming colossal proportions, if the brilliancy of their colours
and perfume intoxicated the smell and the sight, they quickly
withered. The air which they absorbed rapidly exhausted them, and
they soon died, faded, and dried up.

Such was the fate of the famous tulip, which, after several days
of splendour, became emaciated, and fell lifeless.

It was soon the same with the domestic animals, from the house-