JOHN-GO-TO-BED-AT-NOON 321 
flowers (the familiar daisy is one) which close in 
the evening, folding themselves up or covering 
their round discs with their petals as a child covers 
her face with her fingers, and this seems right and 
natural and consistent with Nature’s plan. We are 
not yet acquainted with all the secrets of a flower, 
but we at least know that its life and growth are 
from the sun and suppose that when the light and 
heat are withdrawn the work of elaboration going 
or within it is suspended, that the flower is asleep 
and at rest until the vitalising influence returns. 
Why then the extraordinary waste of daylight by 
this one flower, when all others require all the 
light and heat they can get? Has Johnnie’s 
“unconscious intelligence” found out an easier 
way—a method of work by means of which he is 
able to accomplish in his day of three or four hours 
as much as others can do in their twelve to sixteen 
hours’ day? Johnnie then should be the right 
flower for the Socialist to wear on his day, which 
would have to be in June. 
I had asked my man how he could have let his 
field get into such a condition, since the tough wiry 
stems of the goat’s-beard could not be very good 
for his cows as winter feed, and all he could say 
was that it “had come like that of itself”; that 
in the two previous years there had been a slight 
sprinkling of the yellow flower—he didn’t like to 
name it. But how it had come about was now 
plain to see, for before he started mowing balls of 
down could be seen all over the field, shedding 
