Beadle's Dime Novels No. 3: Myra, the Child of Adoption — page 55: what you’re looking at

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

HE BEAUTIFUL GARDEN. 53 rending at first, the only effort that she made was to obtain forgetfulness. Zulima knew not that Clark had arrived at New Orleans, but a strange inquietude came over her. Thoughts of the - sweet and bitter past made her restless day and night; she was haunted by a constant desire to see her child—the child of Daniel Clark; from this innocent creature, wrong and ab- sence in the father had failed to alienate her love. A little out from New Orleans was a pretty country-house, surrounded by ornamental grounds and embowered in tropical trees. It was a small dwelling, secluded and beautiful as a bower; works of art, rare.-books, and light furniture, befitting the climate, gave. an air of refinement and grace within; pas- sion-flowers, briery roses, and other clinging vines draped the cottage without. An avenue of orange and lime trees led to the front door, and behind was a small garden, cooled by the . rain that fell perpetually from a fountain near the center, and glowing with tea-roses, lilies, and a world of those blossoms that grow most thrifty and fragrant in the warm Sonth. Among these beautiful grounds little Myra Clark had been at play since the breakfast-hour. She had chased the hum- ming-birds from their swarming places in the arbors and rose- hedges; she had gathered golden-edged violets from the borders, and leaping up with a laugh to the orange-boughs _ that drooped over the gravel-walk, had torn down the white blossoms and mellow fruit to crowd with the flowery spoil that she had gathered in the skirt of her muslin dress. And now with her lap full of broken flowers, fruit, torn grass, and pebble-stones, the child cast herself on the rich turf that swell- ed up to the brink of the fountain, and pressing her dimpled hands and warm cheek upon the marble, lay in smiling idle- ness, watching the gold-fish, as they darted up and down the “limpid waters, her soft brown eyes sparkling with each new flash of gold or crimson that the restless little creatures im- parted to the waters. Now she would cast a broken rose-bud or a tuft of grass into the fountain, and her laugh rang out wild and clear aboye the bell-like dropping of the water in the marble basin, if she could detect some fish darting up like a den arrow to meet her pretty decoy. Thus lay the child; thus fell the bright water-drops around; and thus, a little way = i i age” Ss wi comichooks.cony