PRESSING WILD FLOWERS 121 



Then we passed on to the next specimen. 

 Was it a miniature sign-post? Before me lay 

 a bare, thick stalk destitute of leaves or 

 branches until two inches from the top, where 

 two maimed arms pointed despairingly to right 

 and left. In the lower left-hand corner lay a 

 strange-looking object that I made out to be a 

 leaf pressed separately to show the poor 

 thing bore leaves after all. I looked at the 

 tips of the horizontal branches almost expect- 

 ing to read there, "One step to somewhere else. 

 Ten miles to anywhere," for the whole plant 

 looked so cynical. 



"Kare, rare, extremely rare!" the old man 

 murmured ecstatically, while a boy friend mut- 

 tered, "What a freak!" in that sepulchral un- 

 dertone so beloved of schoolboys. 



Pressed wild flowers can easily be made to 

 look like flowers and really ought to be distin- 

 guishable from scare-crows and sign-posts ; yet 

 they too often resemble these useful objects, for 

 their petals and leaves are mangled out of all 

 recognition and their branches spread out at 

 impossible angles. They remind one of the 

 strange drawings of little children, with the all 



