PADRE AVELINO 
I have always loved flowers, and some of their familiar faces 
have been as friends when seeing them unexpectedly in far 
lands, even though the branching Geraniums or giant Aralias 
have looked rather different from the puny specimens of 
their kind I had been accustomed to see at home in Europe. 
On the other hand, I have seen tears fill the eyes of a West 
Indian on seeing a pile of Cocoa-nuts in a grocer’s shop in 
a poky little Scots town. To others it was only a pile of 
dingy brown nuts in a window full of miscellanies ; to her it 
was a recollection of a sunlit shore where similar nuts hung 
from graceful palms, and the sound of snowy surf breaking 
for ever on the golden sand was again in her ears. Oh ! 
the power of association ; it is the magic wand of the rain- 
bow-clad Fay, Memory. I chanced to find myself in 
Trinidad, it does not matter why or wherefor ; we all have 
our heartaches at times, and our ways of dulling them. I 
was staying with an old Scotchman, a doctor, who, although 
he had lived there some twenty years, yet spoke as though 
he had only just left Edinburgh, and cherished me, a stranger 
commended to his care, with double tenderness when he 
found the latest soil I had trod in Europe had been that of 
Auld Reekie. “ I long to feel again the East wind that 
blows so fresh along Princes Street,” he said, sniffing with 
disdain the languorous breeze, heavy with scent of Orange- 
flower and Stephanotis, which blew in at the open window 
of his little sitting-room. “ Why not go there ? ” I said. 
But he shook his head. He had talked of going home for 
many years, he would probably continue to do so, and never 
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