THE FLOWERY WAY 123 



less than robust by comparison with those that have, 

 at the edge of the lower petal, a dash of pink, to 

 make the white face whiter, but of a less bloodless 

 white. The purple violets of the sweet species are 

 few and far between, scarcely one in a hundred, but 

 here come great bunches of the dog-violet, twenty or 

 thirty perfect blooms upon a root, and all heaped 

 above the leaves in an inflorescence that takes the 

 world by storm. The honey-guide lines are much 

 more plainly marked in this species, and we frequently 

 see a bee come to them, while the sweet violets, for 

 all their scent, are unvisited. Their traffic is, doubt- 

 less, with the moths by night, and that is why the 

 white variety is so much more abundant than the 

 purple. It must be noted, however, that after this 

 glad season of blossom is over, the violets, sweet and 

 scentless, produce quite inconspicuous flowers, and 

 from them an abundance of seed. Is the blossom, 

 then, purely an act of rejoicing at the return of 

 summer, a piece of holiday-making, after which comes 

 stern business ? There are many deductions, egoistic 

 and otherwise, that man is at liberty to make from 

 this inscrutable habit of the violet. And there is the 

 experiment yet to make whether the seed from a full 

 blossom will produce stronger plants or more aesthetic 

 plants, or in what way differing from the progeny of 

 a petal-less flower on the same root. 



We have run the gauntlet of the violets, not with- 

 out having a few trophies of their winsomeness in 

 our buttonhole. But, oh for a bit of Alice's cake 

 wherewith to make ourselves about two feet high for 

 a revel in yonder meadow of cowslips ! There they 

 stand, as they did years and years ago, in their pale, 



