Europe -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; New Zealand -- Social life and customs -- Fiction; Short stories, New Zealand
But on the other side of the drive there was a high box border and the
paths had box edges and all of them led into a deeper and deeper tangle
of flowers. The camellias were in bloom, white and crimson and pink and
white striped with flashing leaves. You could not see a leaf on the
syringa bushes for the white clusters. The roses were in
flower—gentlemen’s button-hole roses, little white ones, but far too
full of insects to hold under anyone’s nose, pink monthly roses with a
ring of fallen petals round the bushes, cabbage roses on thick stalks,
moss roses, always in bud, pink smooth beauties opening curl on curl,
red ones so dark they seemed to turn black as they fell, and a certain
exquisite cream kind with a slender red stem and bright scarlet leaves.
There were clumps of fairy bells, and all kinds of geraniums, and there
were little trees of verbena and bluish lavender bushes and a bed of
pelagoniums with velvet eyes and leaves like moths’ wings. There was a
bed of nothing but mignonette and another of nothing but
pansies—borders of double and single daisies and all kinds of little
tufty plants she had never seen before.
The red-hot pokers were taller than she; the Japanese sunflowers grew
in a tiny jungle. She sat down on one of the box borders. By pressing
hard at first it made a nice seat. But how dusty it was inside! Kezia
bent down to look and sneezed and rubbed her nose.
And then she found herself at the top of the rolling grassy slope that
led down to the orchard. . . . She looked down at the slope a moment;
then she lay down on her back, gave a squeak and rolled over and over
into the thick flowery orchard grass. As she lay waiting for things to
stop spinning, she decided to go up to the house and ask the servant
girl for an empty match-box. She wanted to make a surprise for the
grandmother. . . . First she would put a leaf inside with a big violet
lying on it, then she would put a very small white picotee, perhaps, on
each side of the violet, and then she would sprinkle some lavender on
the top, but not to cover their heads.
She often made these surprises for the grandmother, and they were
always most successful.
“Do you want a match, my granny?”
“Why, yes, child, I believe a match is just what I’m looking for.”
The grandmother slowly opened the box and came upon the picture inside.
“Good gracious, child! How you astonished me!”
“I can make her one every day here,” she thought, scrambling up the
grass on her slippery shoes.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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