there is one that is like a wonderful, scarlet, shining leaf, with a thick little tail at the tip of it, twisted round in a coil. This tail is orange with cream-white spots upon it, but just at its _own_ tip it is scarlet again, like the rest of the leaf. Such a wonderful-looking flower! There are creeping crimson nasturtiums that make the air blush in spots, azaleas with scarlet that has swooned into pink, and pink that has blushed into scarlet, and calceolarias that look like yellow flower-bubbles that fairies have blown into the air and that have come down, softly, upon delicate little stalks, and stayed there without bursting. Not all of these wonderful flowers have a scent, for scented flowers are commoner here in England than in far-off tropical countries. But a few of them have, and _their_ scent is so exquisite that you would think it was sent from heaven. Some of the flowers have leaves that are even more beautiful than themselves, and sometimes it is the leaves that you look at and not the flowers at all. Some of these leaves seem to be made of velvet, or something even softer and more velvety _than_ velvet, whilst the colours in them are like the pattern of a very beautiful Turkey carpet. Others look like wonderful spear-heads or the tops of very ornamental park railings, green and red and orange, and all striped and spotted and speckled like the skin of newts or lizards. There are some leaves so large, too, that they would almost make a carpet for a _very_ small room, and so handsome that you might go into all the haberdashers' shops in the world without finding any carpet that would look nearly so well. Some are still larger, and those are the leaves of palm-trees that bend down from high in the air, at the end of long, bending stalks that spring from the top of the small slender stem. They are of such a soft, lovely green that it makes you cool even to look up at them, and so graceful and delicate that you think of the fairies, but so big and strong that a giant might lie upon them and go to sleep, without breaking them or crushing them down. And there are wonderful cactuses--so large that they are called trees--with trunks like great, prickly, green caterpillars, and branches like smaller, prickly, green caterpillars stuck on to them by the tail. But on these ugly branches there are flowers like beautiful purple stars, whilst in the pools or the rivers, water-lilies are floating that look like large, purple flakes of snow. It is amongst flowers and leaves and trees like these that the Humming-birds fly about. Those are the wonderful goblets out of which they sip their nectar.