Once upon a time, as dawn broke, the garden began to wake and the dew on the flowers sparkled like diamonds. Molly the Morning Glory had just opened her petals and stretched herself out. She looked around her garden and suddenly felt that it was all too white, too blue, too dark. Why, there was no fun about it at all!
“Come round here, all of you, to this side of the garden,” she cried. “Come several of you. Here I stand like a flower-pot with nothing in it, and it would look so pretty if you would all just come round for a quarter of an hour.”
Now the Honesty was not so very royal-looking; the Lobelia liked to be well with the Petunias and the Heliotrope, and the little Pink thought she was too princess-like to go near the Morning Glory.
Molly herself was of too noble a character to answer anybody back if they did not stop talking to show that they were not pleased; the Morning Glories were a mild sort of fuchsia, which flower through the entire summer, and they are very nice to ask questions of.
“Why, what’s to become of us?” cried out her next-door neighbour, the Honeysuckle, whose vines were one mass of delicate blossoms. “I will come, for I have lots of flowers left. Petunias, dear!”
“Never mind me,” said the Petunia. “I don’t care if they do take a few of my best colours and blanch them; it will never be remarked.”
“And will you really mind coming?” said the Honesty shyly, who was rather inclined to take everybody’s opinion on the superstitious question whether she was a plant or a weed.
Then all the little plants, who were on the whole good-natured, made ready, each flower just putting in a colour, or here and there a white blossom. Soon one and all marched round to the place pointed out by the fuchsia.
“My dearest, beautiful friend, let me be one moment on your breast,” whispered the Rose-bud; but at that same moment it pricked Molly into tears with her thorn.
As she bent down, however, she heard—
“Oh, what elegance! what beauty! what a cocktail of colours!”
And when she looked up she saw, to her horror, that a great Papilio Ulysses had halted on his way, and was working away with his trunk just to enclose some of her strongest colours and make a drawing of her.
There were also two ladies on the opposite side, who had certainly not been invited. They hoisted black and yellow flags on a long, elegant ship of war, and did not care a straw for the splendid pages of colours, of which the Papilio was gradually taking strip after strip. She opened her shining haunch in gluttonous delight, and slowly they contrived to take in the greater part of Molly, with many of her dress-coat friends just as bee and butterflies had begun to approach in their numbers.
What help was there now for it? Everybody had done their best, so it was a pity to quarrel. Besides, nature always knows; and those creatures belonging to A, B, C, D, which breath in colours, places delicious morsels on black and yellow wavy flags, for it gives new strength to every flier; while the Papilio would not let a morsel of it remain over after the grand dinner-party which it gave in its transport of joy to all the neighbours.
This was without doubt a fine arrangement of nature’s, for good and black too; but the Papilio was the only one in the Papilio Ulysses department of four winged flowers which behaves in such a hospitable manner.