The cushions which converted the tops of these cases into seats were stuffed with dried beech-leaves.
The princess quoted Latin to us for her preference for the fine springy upholstery which beech-leaves give. Silva domus, cubilia frondes. ("The wood a house, the foliage a couch.")
The other furniture in the room was a long table placed in front of the book-case divan, a table covered with piles of MS. books, a press for specimens, two microscopes, and a great blue china bowl containing pussy-willows in water—our specimens for the day's study. High book-cases, whose contents could only be guessed at, for the glass doors were lined with curiously shirred green silk, were ranged against the wall opposite, and at one end of the room stood a monumental German stove in white porcelain; at the other was Miss Prillwitz's chair, a high-backed Gothic affair, which had once served as an episcopal sedilium, but had been removed on the occasion of a new furnishing of the church.
It formed a stately background for the little figure. I often found myself making sketches of her on the sheets of soft paper between which we pressed our flowers, instead of listening to the lecture. I liked to imagine how she would look in a great ruff, not of Cynthia Vaughn's mosquito net, but of real point de Venise.
And yet her talks were very interesting; she was a true lover of nature, and made us love her. She regretted that she could not take us into the deep woods, but she opened our eyes to the wealth of country suggestiveness which we could find in the city. She introduced us personally to the scanty two dozen or so of trees in the little park, and from the intimate acquaintance formed with each of these, our appetites were whetted for vast wildernesses of forest primeval.
She opened to us the beauty which there lies in the simple branching of the trees in their winter nudity, the tracery of the limbs and twigs cut clearly against a yellow sunset, or picked out with snow; how the elms gave graceful wine-glass and Greek-vase outlines; the snakily mottled sycamore undulated its great arms like a boa-constrictor reaching out for prey; the birch, "the lady of the woods," displayed her white satin dress; the gnarled hemlocks wrestled upward, each sharp angle a defiance to the winter storms with which they had striven in heroic combat, the bent knees clutching the rocks, while the aged arms writhed and tossed in the grasp of the fiends of the air. She showed us the beautiful parabolic curve of the willows, a bouquet of rockets; the military bearing of a row of Lombardy poplars standing, in their perfect alignment, like tall grenadiers drawn up in a hollow square. Before the first tender blurring of the leaf-buds we knew our trees, and loved them for their almost human qualities.
Miss Sartoris had taught me, the preceding summer, to look for the decorative beauty to be found in common roadside weeds, and we had made sketches together of dock, elecampane, tansy, thistles, and milkweed. I had one rich, rare day with her in a swamp, when I ruined a pair of stockings, and made the discovery that a skunk-cabbage was as beautiful in its curves as a calla. I brought these sketches to the princess, and she congratulated me on the possession of my country home with its gold-mines of beauty all around.
"You are one heiress, my dear," she said, "to ze vast wealths which you have only to learn how you s'all enjoy. Only t'ink of ze sousands of poor city people who haf never had ze felicity to see a swamp!"
I grew to appreciate the country, and to feel that I was richer than I had thought.
Milly found a branch of study which was not above the measure of her intellect. She soon mastered the long names, and learned to think, and teachers in other departments noted an improvement. There was need for this, for the Hornets long kept up a tradition that at one of the history examinations Milly had been asked, "What is the Salic Law?" and had replied, confidently—"That no woman or descendant of a woman, can ever reign in France."