"To fill his paint-box again," remarked the cuckoo, who seemed to read Griselda's thoughts.
"But what are they painting, cuckoo?" she inquired eagerly.
"All the flowers in the world," replied the cuckoo. "Autumn, winter, and spring, they're hard at work. It's only just for the three months of summer that the butterflies have any holiday, and 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 don't meddle with them in their stupid, clumsy way."
"But how do they get the flowers sent up to the world, cuckoo?" asked Griselda.
"They're packed up, of course, and taken up at night when all of you are asleep," said the cuckoo. "They're painted on elastic
stuff, you see, which fits itself as the plant grows. Why, if your eyes were as they are usually, Griselda, you couldn't even see the petals the butterflies are painting now."
"And the packing up," said Griselda; "do the butterflies do that too?"