dark shrubs with a silvery sheen, enormous
hedges, and groves of bamboo, a fountain reared the fluttering banner
of its spray from the midst of a black pool confined within a white
curb; but the bubbling pillar did not attain to the height of its dark
sylvan background. In the dim background, however, above the cold deep
green of the park, rose a mighty erythrina like a rose-colored flame
into the rich blue air, like a monstrous, fiery syringa. The light
coursed hotly down the smooth trunks of the palms, golden white it
curled about the gentle curve of their slender hips, like frozen silver
it weighed upon the serrated palm-leaves, often seeming to slip down
and fall, so that the liberated leaf gave a little leap upward into a
new bath of silver; the rigid leaves of black-green bushes were sown
with immobile, penetrating scintillations; above the masses of
dagger-sharp leaves in the grove of bamboo the light swarmed like a
golden vapor rolling up, as it were, in itself; red and white and deep
violet and yellow and iridescent blue flowers of gigantic size cowered
in the dark green; the erythrina stood quietly there upright like a
mountain of fire; everything rested voluptuously, or overwhelmed, in
the glow of the higher-mounting sun--only the snowy importunity of the
fountain wore itself out in impotent resistance to his sway. I too
stood motionless in an unshaded opening; I no longer felt the glow as a
burden; with rapture, with awe, with rapture I felt its untamable
creative energy--just as years before, one cold winter night, I had
felt its lust of destruction at a conflagration in a village of my
mountain home,--the one as wild, as inexorable as the other.

For a long while I stood thus absorbed in meditation, until suddenly I
became conscious that something or other disturbed, disquieted,
irritated me. I spied about, and found that at quite a distance away,
near a low bosket of light green, a head covered by a yellow straw hat
emerged and vanished again in rhythmical alternation. I recognized the
chief gardner of the city park, a German with whom I was well
acquainted. I went slowly up to him and was about to ask him what game
he was playing--I had almost taken him for a ghost--when I observed in
his hand a small basket nearly half filled with leaves. The handsome,
well preserved old man with the shrewd, kindly, white-bearded face told
me now that these bushes with the grayish green, lanciform little
leaves were Ch