are dying out; the red and white clovers, the broad, flat leaves of the plantain,—­“the white man’s foot,” as the Indians called it,—­the wiry, jointed stems of that iron creeping plant which we call “knot-grass,” and which loves its life so dearly that it is next to impossible to murder it with a hoe, as it clings to the cracks of the pavement;—­all these plants, and many more, she wove into her fanciful garlands and borders.—­On one of the pages were some musical notes.  I touched them from curiosity on a piano belonging to one of our boarders.  Strange!  There are passages that I have heard before, plaintive, full of some hidden meaning, as if they were gasping for words to interpret them.  She must have heard the strains that have so excited my curiosity, coming from my neighbor’s chamber.  The illuminated border she had traced round the page that held these notes took the place of the words they seemed to be aching for.  Above, a long monotonous sweep of waves, leaden-hued, anxious and jaded and sullen, if you can imagine such an expression in water.  On one side an Alpine needle, as it were, of black basalt, girdled with snow.  On the other a threaded waterfall.  The red morning-tint that shone in the drops had a strange look,—­one would say the cliff was bleeding;—­perhaps she did not mean it.  Below, a stretch of sand, and a solitary bird of prey, with his wings spread over some unseen object.—­And on the very next page a procession wound along, after the fashion of that on the title-page of Fuller’s “Holy War,” in which I recognized without difficulty every boarder at our table in all the glory of the most resplendent caricature—­three only excepted,—­the Little Gentleman, myself, and one other.

I confess I did expect to see something that would remind me of the girl’s little deformed neighbor, if not portraits of him.—­There is a left arm again, though;—­no,—­that is from the “Fighting Gladiator,” the “Jeune Heros combattant” of the Louvre;—­there is the broad ring of the shield.  From a cast, doubtless. [The separate casts of the “Gladiator’s” arm look immense; but in its place the limb looks light, almost slender,—­such is the perfection of that miraculous marble.  I never felt as if I touched the life of the old Greeks until I looked on that statue.]—­Here is something very odd, to be sure.  An Eden of all the humped and crooked creatures!  What could have been in her head when she worked out such a fantasy?  She has contrived to give them all beauty or dignity or melancholy grace.  A Bactrian camel lying under a palm.  A dromedary flashing up the sands,—­spray of the dry ocean sailed by the “ship of the desert.”  A herd of buffaloes, uncouth, shaggy-maned, heavy in the forehand, light in the hind-quarter. [The buffalo is the lion of the ruminants.] And there is a Norman horse, with his huge, rough collar, echoing, as it were, the natural form of the other beast.  And here are twisted serpents; and stately swans, with