Griselda had to stoop a good deal, but she did manage to get in without knocking her head or doing any damage. Inside was just a mass of butterflies. A confused mass it seemed at first, but after a while she saw that it was the very reverse of confused. The butterflies were all settled in rows on long, narrow, white tables, and before each was a tiny object about the size of a flattened-out pin's head, which he was most carefully painting with one of his tentacles, which, from time to time, he moistened by rubbing it on the head of a butterfly waiting patiently behind him. Behind this butterfly again stood another, who after a while took his place, while the first attendant flew away. "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?" "No," said the cuckoo, "the fairies look after that." "How wonderful!" exclaimed Griselda. But before the cuckoo had time to say more a sudden tumult filled the air. It was butterfly dinner-time! "Are you hungry, Griselda?" said the cuckoo. "Not so very," replied Griselda. "It's just as well perhaps that you're not," he remarked, "for I don't know that you'd be much the better for dinner here."