232 LODGES IN THE WILDERNESS 



well over its borders, and the latent life of the 

 waste had leaped, responsive, to the surface. 

 Now a whole flora that had slept for years in 

 tubers and dry stalks sent forth blossoms in 

 million-fold rivalry to attract the replete, 

 drowsy insects. 



Here, from a dense, thorny, involuted mass 

 of gnarled, shapeless stems that must have 

 been many centuries old, arose the delicate, 

 fairy-like petals of a scented pelargonium. 

 The corolla was snow-white, except for a 

 minute, sagittate marking of bright cerise on 

 the lower lip. If you had examined ten thou- 

 sand of these flowers you would not have 

 found one in which that little mark varied to 

 the extent of the ten-thousandth part of an 

 inch. The thought of which that blossom was 

 the manifestation — the afterthought of which 

 the tiny cerise arrow T head was the expression — 

 dwelt down in the unlovely labyrinth of the 

 monstrous stems, and had been adhered to 

 with steady persistence through successions of 

 long arid-year periods. It was whispered to 

 the silk-winged seed from which that hoary 

 patriarch had birth, — perhaps when Alaric was 

 thundering at the gates of Rome. And it 

 would be as unerringly transmitted to 

 blossoms making sweet the breeze in days 



