stuccoed vases prematurely worn and time-stained; while several rare
exotics had, however, thriven so unwisely and well in that stimulating
soil as to lose their exclusive refinement and acquire a certain
temporary vulgarity. A few, with the not uncommon enthusiasm of aliens,
had adopted certain native peculiarities with a zeal that far exceeded
any indigenous performance. But dominant through all was the continual
suggestion of precocious fruition and premature decay that lingered like
a sad perfume in the garden, but made itself persistent if less poetical
in the house.

Here the fluted wooden columns of the portico and colonnade seemed to
have taken upon themselves a sodden and unwholesome age unknown to stone
and mortar. Moss and creeper clung to paint that time had neither dried
nor mellowed, but left still glairy in its white consistency. There were
rusty red blotches around inflamed nail-holes in the swollen wood, as of
punctures in living flesh; along the entablature and cornices and in the
dank gutters decay had taken the form of a mild deliquescence; and the
pillars were spotted as if Nature had dropped over the too early ruin
a few unclean tears. The house itself was lifted upon a broad wooden
foundation painted to imitate marble with such hopeless mendacity that
the architect at the last moment had added a green border, and the owner
permitted a fallen board to remain off so as to allow a few privileged
fowls to openly explore the interior. When Miss Sally Dows played the
piano in the drawing-room she was at times accompanied by the uplifted
voice of the sympathetic hounds who sought its quiet retreat in
ill-health or low spirits, and from whom she was separated only by
an imperfectly carpeted floor of yawning seams. The infant progeny
of "Mammy Judy," an old nurse, made this a hiding-place from domestic
justice, where they were eventually betrayed by subterranean giggling
that had once or twice brought bashful confusion to the hearts of Miss