onnade, forming
the most beautiful bowers; advancing through which, you fancied that
the palace beyond must be chambered in a fountain, or frozen in a
crystal. Three sparkling rivulets flowing from the heights were led
across its summit, through great trunks half buried in the thatch;
and emptying into a sculptured channel, running along the eaves,
poured over in one wide sheet, plaited and transparent. Received into
a basin beneath, they were thence conducted down the vale.

The sides of the palace were hedged by Diomi bushes bearing a flower,
from its perfume, called Lenora, or Sweet Breath; and within these
odorous hedges, were heavy piles of mats, richly dyed and embroidered.

Here lounging of a glowing noon, the plaited cascade playing, the
verdure waving, and the birds melodious, it was hard to say, whether
you were an inmate of a garden in the glen, or a grotto in the sea.

But enough for the nonce, of the House of the Morning. Cross we the
hollow, to the House of the Afternoon.

CHAPTER LXXVII
The House Of The Afternoon

For the most part, the House of the Afternoon was but a wing built
against a mansion wrought by the hand of Nature herself; a grotto
running into the side of the mountain. From high over the mouth of
this grotto, sloped a long arbor, supported by great blocks of stone,
rudely chiseled into the likeness of idols, each bearing a carved
lizard on its chest: a sergeant's guard of the gods condescendingly
doing duty as posts.

From the grotto thus vestibuled, issued hilariously forth the most
considerable stream of the glen; which, seemingly overjoyed to find
daylight in Willamilla, sprang into the arbor with a cheery, white
bound. But its youthful enthusiasm was soon repressed; its waters
being caught in a large stone basin, scooped out of the natural rock;
whence, staid and decorous, they traversed sundry moats; at last
meandering away, to join floods with the streams trained to do
service at the other end of the vale.

Truant streams: the livelong day wending their loitering path to the
subterraneous outlet, flowing into which, they disappeared. But no
wonder they loitered; passing such ravishing landscapes. Thus with
life: man bounds out of night; runs and babbles in the sun; then
returns to his darkness again; though, peradventure, once more to
emerge.

But the grotto was not a mere outlet to the stream. Flowing through a
dark flume in the rock, on both sides it left a dry, elev