"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."
"What is a trillium?" asked Ethel Brown.
"Roger brought in a handful the other day. 'Wake-robin' he called it."
"O, I remember them. There was a bare stalk with three leaves and the
flower was under the leaves."
"There were three petals to the corolla and three sepals to the calyx.
He had purple ones and white ones."
"Here's a white one this very minute," said Dorothy, pouncing upon a
plant eight or ten inches in height whose leaves looked eager and
strong.
"See," she said as they all leaned over to examine it; "the blossom has
two sets of leaves. The outer set is usually green or some color not so
gay as to attract insects or birds that might destroy the flower when it
is in bud. These outer leaves are called, all together, the calyx, and
each one of them is called a sepal."
"The green thing on the back of a rose is the calyx and each of its
leaflets is called a sepal," said Ethel Brown by way of fixing the
definition firmly in her mind.
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