Sealed Lips — page 109: what you’re looking at

Machine-transcribed from the original scan — historical spelling and the odd misread are preserved.

SEALED LIPS. 101 How still, and what a delicious warmth there is in this miniature forest.” It was beautiful in reality, but of a fictitious nature and singularly enervating. There was nothing natural or familiar to the Parisians; either the wall concealed under the crawling verdure of the Lycopodium, or the light through the glass roof, or the trees with such excessively large trunks, compared to their height, that they looked like large hogsheads from which grew slender branches of light foliage. Patrice recognized the scenes that he had looked at every morning for so long a time, only ona grander scale. He saw once more the gigantic tropical ferns, the clusters of bamboo with their long yellow sticks crowned by a long slender foliage, like ostrich feathers, the entangled net- work of tropical creepers, orchids with long droop- ing foliage at once charming and hideous, looking like large insects sleeping under their folded wings. Above all, he recognized those intoxicating emana- tions to which he was so accustomed and which he could endure without suffering. “Yes, it is beautiful,” said he, seating himself a few steps from his companion. “It is as beautiful as that which is not realcan be. An adorable false- hood, limited to a duration of some moments anda space of a few feet. We are benumbed now by these beautiful illusions. Soon we shall pass out of this door and find the cold reality again, the frosty air, the bare ground, leafless trees. The truth will Eomicbooks (E(0)