17.  Perhaps; or even the painters! or even an ordinary unbotanical human creature!  I must set about my business, at any rate, in my own way, now, as I best can, looking first at things themselves, and then putting this and that together, out of these botanical persons, which they can’t put together out of themselves.  And first, I go down into my kitchen garden, where the path to the lake has a border of pansies on both sides all the way down, with clusters of narcissus behind them.  And pulling up a handful of pansies by the roots, I find them “without stems,” indeed, if a stem means a wooden thing; but I should say, for a low-growing flower, quiet lankily and disagreeably stalky!  And, thinking over what I remember about wild pansies, I find an impression on my mind of their being rather more stalky, always, than is quite graceful; and, for all their fine flowers, having rather a weedy and littery look, and getting into places where they have no business.  See, again, vol. i., chap. vi., Sec. 5.

18.  And now, going up into my flower and fruit garden, I find (June 2nd, 1881, half-past six, morning.) among the wild saxifrages, which are allowed to grow wherever they like, and the rock strawberries, and Francescas, which are coaxed to grow wherever there is a bit of rough ground for them, a bunch or two of pale pansies, or violets, I don’t know well which, by the flower; but the entire company of them has a ragged, jagged, unpurpose-like look; extremely,—­I should say,—­demoralizing to all the little plants in their neighbourhood:  and on gathering a flower, I find it is a nasty big thing, all of a feeble blue, and with two things like horns, or thorns, sticking out where its ears would be, if the pansy’s frequently monkey face were underneath them.  Which I find to be two of the leaves of its calyx ‘out of place,’ and, at all events, for their part, therefore, weedy, and insolent.

19.  I perceive, farther, that this disorderly flower is 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 infinitesimal 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.