The Splendid Porsenna Author:Hugh Fraser Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: somehow, and pounced on the orange with a triumphant lurch that nearly sent her over again, and then hugged it to her little heart in an ecstasy of triumph ; giv... more »ing it up very reluctantly to the dear giant father who would send it spinning away once more into the distance so that Honora might run after it again and grow strong and firm on her feet. When she was big enough not to tumble at every third step, there came another joy into her life, and that the orange-trees taught her. They had a way of dropping their leaves—the greenest and most shining ones—into the runnel at their feet, and the leaves sometimes went spinning down all the length of the viale till they came to the iron grating that led into the bowels of the earth at last. So Honora would climb up and pick the leaves, one, two, three, of the strong young ones, and pin them up at either end with a tiny twig from the spiraea bush, and would fill them with cargoes of violets or rose leaves, and then follow their course anxiously till ruin took them at the iron grating, where the bubbles went through with an angry swirl, and where there was always a little tangle of garden wreckage waiting for Peppino and his rake. Peppino had tertian fever most of the year, so that the garden had rather an independent time of it on the whole. It was Honora's joy in the hot summer days to sHp away from the sun-steeped garden into the vast vaulted space on the ground floor of the chapter{Section 4palace, where Peppino stored his pots, and flowers, and garden culch, on shelves round three sides of the damp peeling walls. On the fourth side was a kind of scaffolding like a stage cottage—having a door for the hero to disappear through when he has scaled the crazy steps, and a window for the heroine to shriek from after she is sure th...« less