Page:Mrs Molesworth - The Cuckoo Clock.djvu/165

VII.] then a few stray ones now and then wander up to the world, and people talk about 'idle butterflies'! And even then it isn't true that they are idle. They go up to take a look at the flowers, to see how their work has turned out, and many a damaged petal they repair, or touch up a faded tint, though no one ever knows it."

"I know it now," said Griselda. "I will never talk about idle butterflies again—never. But, cuckoo, do they paint all the flowers here, too? What a fearful lot they must have to do!"

"No," said the cuckoo; "the flowers down here are fairy flowers. They never fade or die, they are always just as you see them. But the colours of your flowers are all taken from them, as you have seen. Of course they don't look the same up there," he went on, with a slight contemptuous shrug of his cuckoo shoulders; "the coarse air and the ugly things about must take the bloom off. The wild flowers do the best, to my thinking; people