feeling and effect. The Court of Flowers is Italian, the Court of Palms
Grecian, though Grecian with an exuberance scarcely Athenian. Perhaps
there is something Sicilian in the warmth of its decoration. When it is
bright and warm, the Court of Palms is most Greek in feeling; less so on
duller days.

But the Court of Flowers is Italian in all moods. With its shady balcony
above the colonnade, it might be in Verona or Mantua. It is a graceful
court, formal, yet curiously informal. Its paired Corinthian columns,
its conventional lions by the porches and its flower girls around the
balcony, its lamp standards and the sculptured fountain, go with formal
gardens. The garden here is itself formal in its planting, and yet so
simple, so natural, that it banishes all ceremony.

This garden is one of the best things in the truly wonderful floral show
at the Exposition. The flowers are massed as we always dream of seeing
them in the fields,--a dream never quite so well realized before. The
areas of the court in the Exposition's opening weeks were solid fields
of daffodils, thick as growing wheat, with here and there a blood-red
poppy, set to accent the yellow gold of the mass. Other flowers have now
replaced these in an equal blaze of color. Here, too, are free, wild
clumps of trees and shrubs, close set, with straggling outposts among
the flowers, as natural as those bordering grain fields in California
valleys.

It is a summery court, lacking but one thing to make it ideally perfect.
It ought to have crickets and cicadas in it, to rasp away as the warm
afternoons turn into evening, and tree hylas to make throaty music in
the still, rich-lighted night.