en. Evening comes, and the shadow sweeps the green over the
mantelpiece; the ruffled surface of ocean. No ships come; the aimless
waves sway beneath the empty sky. It's night; the needles drip blots of
blue. The green's out.

BLUE

The snub-nosed monster rises to the surface and spouts through his blunt
nostrils two columns of water, which, fiery-white in the centre, spray
off into a fringe of blue beads. Strokes of blue line the black
tarpaulin of his hide. Slushing the water through mouth and nostrils he
sings, heavy with water, and the blue closes over him dowsing the
polished pebbles of his eyes. Thrown upon the beach he lies, blunt,
obtuse, shedding dry blue scales. Their metallic blue stains the rusty
iron on the beach. Blue are the ribs of the wrecked rowing boat. A wave
rolls beneath the blue bells. But the cathedral's different, cold,
incense laden, faint blue with the veils of madonnas.

KEW GARDENS

From the oval-shaped flower-bed there rose perhaps a hundred stalks
spreading into heart-shaped or tongue-shaped leaves half way up and
unfurling at the tip red or blue or yellow petals marked with spots of
colour raised upon the surface; and from the red, blue or yellow gloom
of the throat emerged a straight bar, rough with gold dust and slightly
clubbed at the end. The petals were voluminous enough to be stirred by
the summer breeze, and when they moved, the red, blue and yellow lights
passed one over the other, staining an inch of the brown earth beneath
with a spot of the most intricate colour. The light fell either upon the
smooth, grey back of a pebble, or, the shell of a snail with its brown,
circular veins, or falling into a raindrop, it expanded with such
intensity of red, blue and yellow the thin walls of water that one
expected them to burst and disappear. Instead, the drop was left in a
second silver grey once more, and the light now settled upon the flesh
of a leaf, revealing the branching thread of fibre beneath the surface,
and again it moved on and spread its illumination in the vast green
spaces beneath the dome of the heart-shaped and tongue-shaped leaves.
Then the breeze stirred rather more briskly overhead and the colour was
flashed into the air above, into the eyes of the men and women who walk
in Kew Gardens in July.

The figures of these men and women straggled past the flower-bed with a
curiously irregular movement not unlike that of the white and blue
butterflies who crosse