The White Lily. [5

 

On one of the prettiest banks of the prettiest
torrents that ripple down towards the stately rivers
in that far-off land, a slender and spotless lily grew
beneath weeping willows and looked out upon the
world.

The world that he saw was a wilder world than the
land beside the blue.sea or on the blue plains.

Great hills were around him, with tall pine-woods
upon their crests, under whose shade the purple
columbine and crimson foxglove, the red rhododen-
dron and the flaming tiger-lily, bloomed side by side
with the tender cyclamen that lays its ears back, as
though in imitation of the soft little rabbits that run
through the carpet of bilberry plants at its feet.

Above his head was a great cliff, upon whose
summits the tops of the pine trees stirred in the
breeze as the plume of the helmet of a great warrior,
and within all the little fissures and furrows of whose
great face the red-berried arbutus tree, the white
acacia, the purple-flowered Judas-tree, and the grace-
ful mountain ash with its cockades of scarlet, found