"Oh, no; it begins with C."

"Clematis?" said Adela.

"Clematis. Right you are, Adela. And the common name for Clematis is
Traveller's Joy. And that's the name for you, Mary, because you're
going to serve their senses that travel by hedges and ditches and
perhaps have no garden."

"Traveller's Joy," said Harry. "Hooray!"

"Hooray!" said Adela, and she waved the Weeding Woman's bonnet.

It was a charming name, but it was too good for me, and I said so.

Arthur jumped on the rockers, and rocked me to stop my talking. When I
was far back, he took the point of my chin in his two hands and lifted
up my cheeks to be kissed, saying in his very kindest way, "It's not a
bit too good for you--it's you all over."

Then he jumped off as suddenly as he had jumped on, and as I went back
with a bounce he cried, "Oh, Mary! give me back that letter. I must
put another postscript and another puzzlewig. 'P.P.S.--Excellent
Majesty: Mary will still be our Little Mother on all common occasions,
as you wished, but in the Earthly Paradise we call her Traveller's
Joy.'"

CHAPTER VII.

There are two or three reasons why the part of Traveller's Joy suited
me very well. In the first place it required a good deal of trouble,
and I like taking trouble. Then John was willing to let me do many
things he would not have allowed the others to do, because he could
trust me to be careful and to mind what he said.

On each side of the long walk in the kitchen garden there are flowers
between you and the vegetables, herbaceous borders, with nice big
clumps of things that have suckers, and off-shoots and seedlings at
their feet.

"The Long Walk's the place to steal from if I wasn't an _honest_
Root-gatherer," said Harry.

John had lovely poppies there that summer. When I read about the
poppies Alphonse Karr sowed in the wild nooks of his native country,
it made me think of John's French poppies, and paeony poppies, and
ranunculus poppies, and carnation poppies, some very large, some
quite small, some round and neat, some full and ragged like Japanese
chrysanthemums, but all of such beautiful shades of red, rose,
crimson, pink, pale blush, and white, that if they had but smelt like
carnations instead of smelling like laudanum when you have the
toothache, they would have been quite perfect.

In one way they are nicer than carnations. They have such lots of
seed, and it is so easy to get. I asked John to let me have some of
the heads.