"I know how you feel," responded Dorothy slowly. "I feel as if those columbines were birds that had perched on those rocks just for a minute and were going to fly away, and I didn't want to disturb them before they flitted."
They all stood gazing at the delicate, tossing blossoms whose spurred tubes swung in every gentlest breeze.
"It has a bird's name, too," added Dorothy as if there had been no silence; "aquilegia—the eagle flower."
"Why eagle? The eagle is a strenuous old fowl," commented Ethel Brown. "The name doesn't seem appropriate."
"It's because of the spurs—they suggest an eagle's talons."
"That's too far-fetched to suit me," confessed Ethel Brown.
"It is called 'columbine' because the spurs look a little like doves around a drinking fountain, and the Latin word for dove is 'columba," said Dorothy.
"It's queer the way they name flowers after animals—" said Ethel Blue.
"Or parts of animals," laughed her cousin. "Saxifrage isn't; Helen told me the name meant 'rock-breaker,' because some kinds grow in the clefts of rocks the way the columbines do."
"I wish we could find a trillium," said Ethel Blue. "The tri in that name means that everything about it is in threes."