knows not the meaning of those five letters, knows not why the rose is queen of flowers, knows not why the rose is the type of love, knows not why the dear old mediaeval legend changed Bohemian Elizabeth's hidden charity to roses rather than to another flower. The color, oh the impossible color! for the heart of the summer pulsated in its glow, the soul of the sun burned in its intensity, the deep rich light permeated every vein of the petals sumptuous in their substance, and marvellous in their size. No, no! we cannot describe the roses of Provence: but they are there, and you may see them; pass by Paris, and go, if you are wise.
Besides the evergreens, the olive, the pepper-trees, the ilex, the flowers, and the labyrinth, there were the birds who made bridal journeys from all the rest of France to this garden; the butterflies who floated over the flower-beds like blossoms detached and drawn upward by the sun-god; and there was Valerie! Valerie, who all day long flitted through the garden, embodying flower, and bird, and butterfly, and Provencal summer, all in her own mignonne figure; Valerie who loved them all, and was beloved by all, and had feasted all her life upon their beauty, and whose beauty was a feast and daily food to them. A slip of a girl, hardly seventeen: lissome as a passion-flower vine; her clear skin pale and dark with the passionate colorless glow of the South, her purple-black hair hanging in two shining braids from a head fit to be modelled for Hebe; her smooth, low forehead based by two straight black brows, beautiful and threatening as
