Fringed pool,
Fern'd grot—
The veriest school of peace—
interrupted at this line by appropriate and all too ready jibes about peace in Mexico.
Within the larger garden was a sort of inner tabernacle, a sun-bathed, inclosed fruit-garden—peach and quince growing with orange and lemon and fig, and the little pathway was fringed with lilies. The house showed the unmistakable quick results of inoccupancy here; the doors sagged, the windows stuck, and it was dismantled of most of its furniture.
We got out some tables and spread our luncheon in a little mosquete and jasmine-blossoming porch, even with the ground, opening from one of the salons. Continual whiffs of perfume came from the garden, and the air was now damp with threatening rain or indescribably brilliant as the clouds passed. Mrs. Wilson brought some especially good things in the way of jellied chicken and one of the large cocoanut cakes for which the Embassy is famed. Mr. Potter's motor we called "the cantina," for obvious and refreshing reasons.
Afterward, while we waited for the rain to pass, we went to the mirador, built in a corner of the high wall of the bigger garden, overlooking the maguey-fields, which stretched away to the lovely hills, on which great, black shadows were lying between sunlit spaces. When we came down we picked armfuls of flowers, and there were some particularly beautiful trailing blackberry sprays with which we innocently decorated ourselves, but which I have discovered left indelible marks on our raiment. As we filled the motors with wet, sweet, shiny flowers and leaves, we sighed that the owners of anything so lovely should be so distant.
July 15th.
The Schuylers have gone—a week ago—and N. is at the Embassy bright and early these mornings. The ambassador is more and more pessimistic, and there is a huge amount of work to be turned over every day.