“Yes,” Leila answered, “it will; and I will tell you how. Very often when it clears up after rain, and the flowers look very bright, you wish to gather them for drying--I always tell you that it is a bad time, but still you often try to do it--and they get quite dim and discoloured, and you are obliged to throw them away. Now when I wish to dry them, I wait till it has been quite fair for several days, and when it is bright and sunny, and there is no damp in the air, I gather the flowers. I always choose those that are very bright and fully blown, but before they have begun to fade in the slightest degree. If they have a decayed speck no bigger than the head of a pin, do not gather them, for they will not be bright when dried.” “And what more do you do?” “I put them between folds of close smooth writing-paper, never into blotting-paper.” “But Lydia told me it should be blotting-paper.” “No, I have tried that; but the blotting-paper seems to suck the colour out of them. Well, I place those papers between the leaves of a book, and tie it tight up with a ribbon, and put it under a weight; if it is a very tender flower, such as the blue convolvulus, for instance, then you must not put a very heavy weight, the weight must be in proportion to the tenderness of the flower. Next day I change the papers that there may be no damp about them, for nothing spoils their colour so much as damp. Now all this, you see, takes patience; for sometimes I have to change the papers more than once.” “Yes,” Matilda observed, “and such patience, that I am sure I shall never be able to do it. And this is all then?” “No; in putting the flowers into dry bits of paper you must do it very gently, that they may lie quite smooth; for much of their beauty depends on their looking smooth, and not shrivelled up in any way; and I forgot to tell you that sometimes before putting them in at all, I bend the stalks a little to make them lie gracefully. The stalks of the geraniums are so stiff and straight, that I am obliged to take off the flower-heads, and put them in papers by themselves, and then I flatten the stalks and bend them a little before I begin to dry them. The ferns, which you like so much, grow so gracefully, that I seldom have to bend them at all, but just to lay them on paper as they grow. The young ferns of a bright tender green do best: indeed, all green leaves should be dried when they first come out, before they have got to be a deep colour, for green is a very difficult colour to dry well; most yellow flowers do very well, the yellow crocus keeps very bright; indeed, some scarlet and rose-coloured geraniums dry beautifully, and other scarlets won’t dry at all,--you must just get acquainted with those that do well, and with those that don’t.”