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The Best American Humorous Short Stories by Unknown
page 116 of 393 (29%)
"Pictures of the Madonna have not her rare and pensive beauty. Upon
the tranquil little islands her life had been eventless, and all the
fine possibilities of her nature were like flowers that never bloomed.
Placid were all her years; yet I have read of no heroine, of no woman
great in sudden crises, that it did not seem to me she might have
been. The wife and widow of a man who loved his own home better than
the homes of others, I have yet heard of no queen, no belle, no
imperial beauty, whom in grace, and brilliancy, and persuasive
courtesy, she might not have surpassed.

"Madam," said Titbottom to my wife, whose heart hung upon his story;
"your husband's young friend, Aurelia, wears sometimes a camelia in
her hair, and no diamond in the ball-room seems so costly as that
perfect flower, which women envy, and for whose least and withered
petal men sigh; yet, in the tropical solitudes of Brazil, how many a
camelia bud drops from a bush that no eye has ever seen, which, had it
flowered and been noticed, would have gilded all hearts with its
memory.

"When I stole these furtive glances at my grandmother, half fearing
that they were wrong, I saw only a calm lake, whose shores were low,
and over which the sky hung unbroken, so that the least star was
clearly reflected. It had an atmosphere of solemn twilight
tranquillity, and so completely did its unruffled surface blend with
the cloudless, star-studded sky, that, when I looked through my
spectacles at my grandmother, the vision seemed to me all heaven and
stars. Yet, as I gazed and gazed, I felt what stately cities might
well have been built upon those shores, and have flashed prosperity
over the calm, like coruscations of pearls.

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