CHAPTER VIII. THE CITY COTTAGE.
Alas, that woman's love should cling
To hearts that never feel its worth,
As prairie roses creep and fling
Their richest bloom upon the earth.
Overlooking one of those small parks or squares that lie in the heart of our city like tufts of wild flowers in a desert, stands one of those miniature palaces, too small for the very wealthy, and too beautiful in its appointments for any idea but that of perfect taste, which wealth does not always give. A cottage house it was, or rather an exquisite mockery of what one sees named as cottages in the country. The front, of a pale stone color, was so ornamented and netted over with the lace-work of iron balconies and window-gratings, that it had all the elegance of a city mansion, with much of the rustic beauty one sees in a rural dwelling.
A little court, full of flowers, lay in front, with a miniature fountain throwing up a slender column of water from the centre of a tiny grass-plat, that, in the pure dampness always raining over it, lay like a mass of crushed emeralds hidden among the flowers. The netted iron-work that hung around the doors, the windows, and fringed the eaves, as it were, with a valance of massive lace, was luxuriously interwoven with creeping plants. Prairie roses, crimson and white, clung around the lower balconies. Ipomas wove a profusion of their great purple and rosy bells around the upper windows; cypress vines, with their small crimson bells; petunias of every tint; rich passion flowers, and verbenas with their leaves hidden in the light balconies, wove and twined themselves with the coarser vines, blossoming each in its turn, and filling the leaves with their gorgeous tints. Crimson and fragrant honeysuckles twined in massive wreaths up to the very roof, where they grew and blossomed in the lattice-work, now in masses, now spreading out like an embroidery, and everywhere loading the atmosphere with fragrance.
The cool, bell-like dropping of the fountain, that always kept the flowers fresh; the fragrance of half a dozen orange trees, snowy with blossoms and golden with heavy fruit; the gleam of white lilies; the glow of roses, and the graceful sway of a slender labarnum tree, all crowded into one little nook scarcely large enough for the pleasure-grounds of a fairy, were enough to draw general attention to the house, though another and still more beautiful object had never presented itself at the window.
On a moonlight evening, especially when a sort of pearly veil fell upon the little flower nook, an air of quiet beauty impossible to describe, rested around this dwelling—beauty not the less striking that it was so still, so lost in profound repose, that the house might have been deemed uninhabited but for the gleam of light that occasionally broke through the vines about one or another of the windows. Sometimes it might be seen struggling through the roses around the lower balcony, but far oftener it came in faint gleams from a window in the upper story, and at such times the shadow of a person stooping over a book, or lost in deep thought, might be seen through the muslin curtains.