re flat
ones, but you will find that most of these are really groups of flowers,
not single blossoms; and there are out-of-the-way and quaint ones, very
difficult to define as of any shape; but even these have a cup to begin
with, deep down in them. You had better take the idea of a cup or vase, as
the first, simplest, and most general form of true flower.

The botanists call it a corolla, which means a garland, or a kind of crown;
and the word is a very good one, because it indicates that the flower-cup
is made, as our clay cups are, on a potter's wheel; that it is essentially
a _revolute_ form--a whirl or (botanically) 'whorl' of leaves; in reality
successive round the base of the urn they form.

11. Perhaps, however, you think poppies in general are not much like cups.
But the flower in my hand is a--poverty-_stricken_ poppy, I was going to
write,--poverty-_strengthened_ poppy, I mean. On richer ground, it would
have gushed into flaunting breadth of untenable purple--flapped its
inconsistent scarlet vaguely to the wind--dropped the pride of its petals
over my hand in an hour after I gathered it. But this little rough-bred
thing, a Campagna pony of a poppy, is as bright and strong to-day as
yesterday. So that I can see exactly where the leaves join or lap over each
other; and when I look down into the cup, find it to be composed of four
leaves altogether,--two smaller, set within two larger. {72}

[Illustration: FIG. 4.]

12. Thus far (and somewhat farther) I had written in Rome; but now, putting
my work together in Oxford, a sudden doubt troubles me, whether all poppies
have two petals smaller than the other two. Whereupon I take down an
excellent little school-book on botany--the best I've yet found, thinking
to be told quickly; and I find a great deal about opium; and, apropos of
opium, that the juice of common celandine is of a bright orange colour; and
I pause for a bewildered five minutes, wondering if a celandine is a poppy,
and how many petals _it_ has: going on again--because I must, without
making up my mind, on either question--I am told to "observe the floral
receptacle of the Californian genus Eschscholtzia." Now I can't observe
anything of the sort, and I don't want to; and I wish California and all
that's in it were at the deepest bottom of the Pacific. Next I am told to
compare the poppy and waterlily; and I can't do that, neither--though I
should like to; and there's the end of the article; and it n