DESSALINES' GARDEN PARTY
also, smiled, ducked, laughed in the childlike way peculiar to the Japanese.
"You amazing person!" cried Virginia, "is there any tongue which you do not speak?"
"There are few in which I cannot make myself understood," answered Leyden, with a smile. "There is none which I speak well, but for my purpose vocabulary is of more value than rhetoric."
He placed Miss Kathleen in her 'rikisha and they started, the men walking rapidly to keep pace with the short trot of the Japanese. They plunged into the miniature forest, wound between bushes of holly, across a toy Japanese bridge which spanned a singsong little rivulet; on its bank a tiny temple was half hid in a clump of hazels; dainty stone steps led to the door. They entered a fen where the same little rill wound about to form a tiny paddy, diked, flooded, green with sprouting rice.
"If Manning saw that," said Giles, "he would give tongue … what?"
"He would probably drive Dessalines out to irrigate," said Leyden, flippantly. They turned a corner and came suddenly upon the most striking spectacle. Just ahead the torii marked the entrance of the inclosure, forming the frame, as it were, for the lustrous green of the ivy-grown cottage and the banks of purple iris. Directly in the center of this frame stood Dessalines, clad in spotless white, bareheaded, smiling, towering, a majestic figure in the midst of those Lilliputian surroundings. The sable face smiling a welcome, the flashing teeth white as the immaculate white serge, the gigantic figure; all was less grotesque than impressive; there was an imperial quality in the man's calm unconsciousness of his amazing in-
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