14 PROSERPINA. 



lifted on a lanky, awkward, springless, and yet stiff 

 flower-stalk ; which is not round, as a flower-stalk ought 

 to be, (vol. i., p. 155,) but obstinately square, and fluted, 

 with projecting edges, like a pillar run thin out of an 

 iron-foundry for a cheap railway station. I perceive 

 also that it has set on it, just before turning down to 

 carry the flower, two little jaggy and indefinable leaves, 

 their colour a little more violet than the blossom. 



These, and such undeveloping leaves, wherever they 

 occur, are called ' bracts ' by botanists, a good word, from 

 the Latin ' bractea,' meaning a piece of metal plate, so 

 thin as to crackle. They seem always a little stiff, like 

 bad parchment, born to come to nothing a sort of in- 

 finitesimal fairy -lawyer's deed. They ought to have been 

 in my index at p. 255, under the head of leaves, and are 

 frequent in flower structure, never, as far as one can 

 see, of the smallest use. They are constant, however, in 

 the flower-stalk of the whole violet tribe. 



20. I perceive, farther, that this lanky flower-stalk, 

 bending a little in a crabbed, broken way, like an obsti- 

 nate person tired, pushes itself up out of a still more 

 stubborn, nondescript, hollow angular, dogseared gas- 

 pipe of a stalk, with a section something like this, 



but no bigger than \f with a quantity cf 



ill-made and ill-hemmed leaves on it, of no describable 

 leaf -cloth or texture, not cressic, (though the thing does 



