closed her in;--over its face some singular creeper was crawling,
planting tiny reptile-feet into the chiselled letters of the
inscription; and from the moist soil below speckled euphorbias
were growing up to her,--and morning glories,--and beautiful
green tangled things of which he did not know the name.

And the sight of the pretty lizards, puffing their crimson
pouches in the sun, or undulating athwart epitaphs, and shifting
their color when approached, from emerald to ashen-gray;--the
caravans of the ants, journeying to and from tiny chinks in the
masonry;--the bees gathering honey from the crimson blossoms of
the crete-de-coq, whose radicles sought sustenance, perhaps from
human dust, in the decay of generations:--all that rich life of
graves summoned up fancies of Resurrection, Nature's
resurrection-work--wondrous transformations of flesh, marvellous
bans migration of souls! ... From some forgotten crevice of that
tomb roof, which alone intervened between her and the vast light,
a sturdy weed was growing. He knew that plant, as it quivered
against the blue,--the chou-gras, as Creole children call it:
its dark berries form the mockingbird's favorite food ... Might
not its roots, exploring darkness, have found some unfamiliar
nutriment within?--might it not be that something of the dead
heart had risen to purple and emerald life--in the sap of
translucent leaves, in the wine of the savage berries,--to blend
with the blood of the Wizard Singer,--to lend a strange sweetness
to the melody of his wooing? ...

... Seldom, indeed, does it happen that a man in the prime of
youth, in the possession of wealth, habituated to comforts and
the elegances of life, discovers in one brief week how minute his