"There are a few in the West Woods, too."
So they dug up but a comparatively small number of the hepaticas, nor
did they take many of the columbines nodding from a cleft in the
piled-up rocks.
"I know that when we have our wild garden fully planted I'm not going to
want to pick flowers just for the sake of picking them the way I used
to," confessed Ethel Blue. "Now I know something about them they seem so
alive to me, sort of like people--I'm sure they won't like to be taken
travelling and forced to make a new home for themselves."
"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.
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