The Project Gutenberg EBook of A Chilhowee Lily, by
Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

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Title: A Chilhowee Lily
1911

Author: Charles Egbert Craddock (AKA Mary Noailles Murfree)

Release Date: November 19, 2007 [EBook #23554]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A CHILHOWEE LILY ***

Produced by David Widger

A CHILHOWEE LILY

By Charles Egbert Craddock

1911

Tall, delicate, and stately, with all the finished symmetry and
distinction that might appertain to a cultivated plant, yet sharing
that fragility of texture and peculiar suggestion of evanescence
characteristic of the unheeded weed as it flowers, the Chilhowee lily
caught his eye. Albeit long familiar, the bloom was now invested with a
special significance and the sight of it brought him to a sudden pause.

The cluster grew in a niche on the rocky verge of a precipice beetling
over the windings of the rugged primitive road on the slope of the
ridge. The great pure white bloom, trumpet-shaped and crowned with its
flaring and many-cleft paracorolla, distinct against the densely blue
sky, seemed the more ethereal because of the delicacy of its stalk, so
erect, so inflexibly upright. About it the rocks were at intervals green
with moss, and showed here and there heavy ocherous water stain. The
luxuriant ferns and pendant vines in the densely umbrageous tangle of
verdure served to heighten by contrast the keen whiteness of the flower
and the isolation of its situation.

Ozias Crann sighed with perplexity as he looked, and then his eye
wandered down the great hosky slope of the wooded mountain where in
marshy spots, here and there, a sudden white flare in the shadows
betokened the Chilhowee lily, flowering in myraids, holding out lures
bewildering in their multitude.

"They air bloomin' bodaciously all over the mounting," he remarked
rancorously, as he leaned heavily on a pickaxe; "but we uns hed better
try it ter-night ennyhows."

It was late in August; a moon of exceeding lustre was in the sky, while
still the sun was going down. All the western clouds were aflare with
gorgeous refle