GLyCINE! 



have taken at least two score years to reach such a 

 size. 



With the English boy, then barely four, it was a first love. 

 He feasted on it with his every sense. From morning till 

 eve he would be sucking the base of some blue corolla 

 plucked from its calyx, for the sake of that intense sweet- 

 ness to which the thing owes its Gallic name of Glycine , 

 he would, whenever he could, run round and rejoice his 

 eyes with the delicacies of pale green and purple, drink in 

 the scent, and listen hypnotized to the never-ceasing buzz 

 of honey-seekers in the sunshine. And, in the morning, 

 his first thought, as he crept out of his small truckle-bed, 

 was to go and plunge his hands into the dew that glittered 

 upon these Glycine branches nodding in from every side 

 at the mansarde window. 



Like all first loves it was, as you see, violent. Well do I 

 remember how, for months after he was removed back into 

 the Paris house, the small boy would ply his mother with 

 the yearning question, infantilely incorrect but vernacular : 

 " Quand que nous retournerons aux Glycines, Mcananl" 

 always to receive the non-committal but consoling : 

 " Tantot . . . tantot." 



This "tantot" is the wonderful " by-and-by " which never 

 comes to be ! 



And like all first loves this one was utterly forgotten in 

 later years to reappear, however, in the sere and yellow of 

 age. For years a many, a purple Wisteria spreading about 

 the eaves of a south-country house, was to me only a 

 purple Wisteria. It was a creeper, and it was nothing 

 more. It was not a " Glycine " until I had a creepered wall 

 of my own. Then it surged before imagination's eye with 



d 49 



