Blue Aloes

Blue Aloes
Stories of South Africa

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4
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Blue Aloes by Cynthia Stockley

Published:

1919

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2,470

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Blue Aloes
Stories of South Africa

By

4
(1 Review)
No writer can so unfailingly summons and materialize the spirit of the weird, mysterious South Africa as can Cynthia Stockley. She is a favored medium through whom the great Dark Continent its tales unfolds.A strange story is this, of a Karoo farm,--a hedge of Blue Aloes, a cactus of fantastic beauty, which shelters a myriad of creeping things,--a whisper and a summons in the dead of the night,--an odor of death and the old.There are three other stories in the book, stories throbbing with the sudden, intense passion and the mystic atmosphere of the Veldt.Blue AloesThe LeopardRosanne OzanneApril Folly

Book Excerpt

ish her good-morning.

Isabel van Cannan was a big, lazy, laughing woman, with sleepy, golden eyes. She spent hours in bed, lying, as she did now, amid quantities of pillows, doing absolutely nothing. She had told Christine that she was of Spanish extraction, yet she was blond as a Swede. Her hair, which had a sort of lamb's-wool fluffiness, lay upon her pillows in two great ropes, yellow as the pollen of a lily. She took the children one by one into a sleepy embrace, kissed and patted their cheeks, admonishing them to be good and obey Miss Chaine in everything.

"Be sure not to go in the sun without your hats," she adjured the two small girls. "Roddy doesn't matter so much, but little girls' complexions are very important."

Rita and Coral stuck out their rose-pink chins and exchanged a sparkling glance. Christine knew that she would have trouble with them and their hats all day.

"Good-bye," said Mrs. van Cannan, and sank back among her pillows. As the children scampered out of the r