Everything was as clean as clean could be; no litter, no dirt, the
floor nicely swept, the shelves that ran all round and rose, tier upon
tier, in an enormous stand that occupied the whole centre of the
place, all perfectly orderly. On the shelves the bulbs lay, every one
smooth and clean and dry, sorted according to kind and quality;
Mijnheer knew them all; he could, like a book-lover with his books,
put his hand upon any that he wished in the dark. It seemed to Julia
that there were hundreds upon hundreds of different sorts. Not only
hyacinths and tulips and such well-known ones in endless sizes and
varieties, but little roots with six and seven syllable names she had
never heard before, and big roots, too, and strange cornery roots, a
never-ending quantity.

Mijnheer told her they were not yet all in; many were in the ground
and had still to be lifted. This she knew, for she had seen the dead
tops of some in the little enclosed squares where they grew; from her
bedroom window, too, she saw others still in bloom--a patch, the size
of a tennis-lawn squared, of scarlet ranunculous, little blood-red
rosettes, sheltered by a high close-clipped hedge. And another patch
of iris hispanica, fairy flowers of palest gold and lavender,
quivering at the top of their grey-green stalks like tropical
dragon-flies hovering over a field of growing oats. These it seemed,
and many others, would be brought in by and by, then the great barns
would be really full. Mijnheer took up a root here and there, telling
her something of the history of each; explaining how the narcissus
increased and the tulips grew; showing her hyacinth bulbs cut in
half-breadthways with all the separate severed layers distended by
reason of the growing and swelling of the seeds between.

"Each little seed will be a bulb by and by," he said, "but not yet.