and light in their
fair eyes, and they do not touch us. Then we see one, and she holds for
us life or death, and plays with them idly so often--as idly as a child
with toys. She is not nobler, better, or more beautiful than were all
those we passed, and yet the world is empty to us without her.

_SIGNA._

In the garden of these children all the flora of Italy was gathered and
was growing.

The delights of an Italian garden are countless. It is not like any
other garden in the world. It is at once more formal and more wild, at
once greener with more abundant youth and venerable with more antique
age. It has all Boccaccio between its walls, all Petrarca in its leaves,
all Raffaelle in its skies. And then the sunshine that beggars words and
laughs at painters!--the boundless, intense, delicious, heavenly light!
What do other gardens know of that, save in orange-groves of Granada and
rose thickets of Damascus?

The old broken marble statues, whence the water dripped and fed the
water-lily; the great lemon-trees in pots big enough to drown a boy, the
golden globes among their emerald leaves; the magnolias, like trees cast
in bronze, with all the spice of India in their cups; the spires of
ivory bells that the yuccas put forth, like belfries for fairies; the
oleanders taller than a man, red and white and blush colour; the broad
velvet leaves of the flowering rush; the dark majestic ilex oaks, that
made the noon like twilight; the countless graces of the vast family of
acacias; the high box hedges, sweet and pungent in the sun; the stone
ponds, where the gold-fish slept through the sultry day; the wilderness
of carnations; the huge roses, yellow, crimson, snow-white, and the
small noisette and the banksia with its million of pink stars; myrtles
in dense thickets, and camellias like a wood of evergreens; cacti in all
quaint shapes, like fossils astonished to find themselves again alive;
high walls, vine-hung and topped by pines and cypresses; low walls with
crowds of geraniums on their parapets, and the mountains and the fields
beyond them; marble basins hidden in creepers where the frogs dozed all
day long; sounds of convent bells and of chapel chimes; green lizards
basking on the flags; great sheds and granaries beautiful with the
clematis and the wisteria and the rosy trumpets of the bignonia; great
wooden places cool and shady, with vast arched entrances, and scent of
hay, and empty casks, and red earthen amphor