The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 62, December, 1862

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Various. The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 10, No. 62, December, 1862

THE PROCESSION OF THE FLOWERS

ONE OF MY CLIENTS

THE CUMBERLAND

THE FOSSIL MAN

LIFE IN THE OPEN AIR

CHAPTER X

CHAPTER XI

CHAPTER XII

CHAPTER XIII

CHAPTER XIV

CHAPTER XV

A WOMAN

ABOUT WARWICK

LYRICS OF THE STREET. III

MR. AXTELL

MISS AXTELL'S STORY

MY HUNT AFTER "THE CAPTAIN."

WAITING

REVIEWS AND LITERARY NOTICES

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In Cuba there is a blossoming shrub whose multitudinous crimson flowers are so seductive to the humming-birds that they hover all day around it, buried in its blossoms until petal and wing seem one. At first upright, the gorgeous bells droop downward, and fall unwithered to the ground, and are thence called by the Creoles "Cupid's Tears." Frederika Bremer relates that daily she brought home handfuls of these blossoms to her chamber, and nightly they all disappeared. One morning she looked toward the wall of the apartment, and there, in a long crimson line, the delicate flowers went ascending one by one to the ceiling, and passed from sight. She found that each was borne laboriously onward by a little colorless ant much smaller than itself: the bearer was invisible, but the lovely burdens festooned the wall with beauty.

To a watcher from the sky, the march of the flowers of any zone across the year would seem as beautiful as that West-Indian pageant. These frail creatures, rooted where they stand, a part of the "still life" of Nature, yet share her ceaseless motion. In the most sultry silence of summer noons, the vital current is coursing with desperate speed through the innumerable veins of every leaflet; and the apparent stillness, like the sleeping of a child's top, is in truth the very ecstasy of perfected motion.

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I proposed to state what could be proved, and the suspicions that were entertained of the cashier. He objected, and said,—

"I take my departure from these papers. Mr. Temple is aged thirty-eight, a large, well-built man, full six feet high, strongly nerved, bold, proud, and fearless. His mind is active, and in his day he has been professor in a college. He fares well and is fashionably dressed. I think he is not in any legitimate business. He is a German by birth, though he has been in this country several years. He is somewhat affected and immensely hypocritical. I think he is a gambler and dealer in counterfeit money. He certainly is not confined to one department of rascality. This is not the name by which he was christened, if indeed he was ever christened at all. He could not have written it in his youth, and must have assumed it within a year and a half." (Exact in every known particular.)

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