But an imprisoned bird it certainly
was; and its prison consisted of a small, cell-like room, bare of
anything but the heart-broken glances of its occupant. My father
objected to the capture and caging of birds, and looked with cold
disapproval upon the hospitable endeavor of my brother to lengthen
the existence of a little creature that was really safer in the hands
of Dame Nature. Presently the bird from the sad garden died, and then
indeed Florence became intolerable to me! I wandered through the long,
darkish hall that penetrated our edifice from front to back, and I
sometimes emerged into the garden's bosky sullenness in my unsmiling
misery. Again my mother's testimony proves my mind to have been
strangely influenced by what to her was a garden full of roses,
jessamine, orange and lemon trees, and a large willow-tree drooping
over a fountain in its midst, with a row of marble busts along a
terrace: altogether a place that should have filled me with kittenish
glee. The "Note-Books," to be sure, suggest that it harbored malaria.
I looked with painful disappointment upon the unceasing dishes of
fresh purple figs, which everybody else seemed to enjoy. I saw pale
golden wine poured from poetic bottles braided with strands of straw,
like pretty girls' heads of flaxen hair; and I was surprised that my
father had the joyousness to smile, though sipping what he was later
to call "Monte Beni Sunshine."
That nothing of misery might be excluded from my dismal round of woe,
the only people whom I could go to see were the Powers family, living
opposite to us.
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