ne ground leaves, of very pale green,--they may be
six or seven, or more, but always run into a rudely pentagonal arrangement,
essentially first trine, with two succeeding above. Taken as a whole the
_plant_ is really a main link between violets and Droseras; but the
_flower_ has much more violet than Drosera in the make of it,--spurred, and
_five-petaled_,[11] and held down by the top of its bending stalk as a
violet is; only its upper two petals are not reverted--the calyx, of a dark
soppy green, holding them down, with its three front sepals set exactly
like a strong trident, its two backward sepals clasping the spur. There are
often six sepals, four to the front, but the normal number is five. Tearing
away the calyx, I find the flower to have been held by it as a lion might
hold his prey by the loins if he missed its throat; the blue petals being
really campanulate, and the flower best described as a dark bluebell,
seized and crushed almost flat by its own calyx in a rage. Pulling away now
also the upper petals, I find that what are in the violet the lateral and
well-ordered fringes, are here thrown mainly on the lower (largest) petal
near its origin, and opposite the point of the seizure by the calyx,
spreading from this centre over the surface of the lower petals, partly
like an irregular shower of fine Venetian glass broken, partly like the
wild-flung Medusa like embroidery of the white Lucia.[12]

4. The calyx is of a dark _soppy_ green, I said; like that of sugary
preserved citron; the root leaves are of green just as soppy, but pale and
yellowish, as if they were half decayed; the edges curled up and, as it
were, water-shrivelled, as one's fingers shrivel if kept too long in water.
And the whole plant looks as if it had been a violet unjustly banished to a
bog, and obliged to live there--not for its own sins, but for some Emperor
Pansy's, far away in the garden,--in a partly boggish, partly hoggish
manner, drenched and desolate; and with something of demoniac temper got
into its calyx, so that it quarrels with, and bites the corolla;--something
of gluttonous and greasy habit got into its leaves; a discomfortable
sensuality, even in its desolation. Perhaps a penguin-ish life would be
truer of it than a piggish, the _nest_ of it being indeed on the rock, or
morassy rock-investiture, like a sea-bird's on her rock ledge.

5. I have hunted through seven treatises on Botany, namely, Loudon's
Encyclopaedia, Balfour, G