THE ATLANTIC MONTHLY.

A MAGAZINE OF LITERATURE, ART, AND POLITICS.

VOL. X.--DECEMBER, 1862.--NO. LXII.




THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS.


In Cuba there is a blossoming shrub whose multitudinous crimson flowers
are so seductive to the humming-birds that they hover all day around it,
buried in its blossoms until petal and wing seem one. At first upright,
the gorgeous bells droop downward, and fall unwithered to the ground,
and are thence called by the Creoles "Cupid's Tears." Frederika Bremer
relates that daily she brought home handfuls of these blossoms to her
chamber, and nightly they all disappeared. One morning she looked toward
the wall of the apartment, and there, in a long crimson line, the
delicate flowers went ascending one by one to the ceiling, and passed
from sight. She found that each was borne laboriously onward by a little
colorless ant much smaller than itself: the bearer was invisible, but
the lovely burdens festooned the wall with beauty.

To a watcher from the sky, the march of the flowers of any zone across
the year would seem as beautiful as that West-Indian pageant. These
frail creatures, rooted where they stand, a part of the "still life" of
Nature, yet share her ceaseless motion. In the most sultry silence of
summer noons, the vital current is coursing with desperate speed through