are such sleepy, dead-and-alive things, to have about one. You might as well surround yourself with mummies as with poppies. So I rejected this design, and, in the end, came down to plain, cool colours. For this inspiration I was indebted to one of those freaks of memory whereby a trivial incident pops out of the past like a cork from a soda-bottle — when you’re not looking. A gaudy scheme of large, and what I should call floppy, roses against a green trellis suddenly caused me to remember the mumps. There had been roses on the wall opposite my infantile pallet — thirty-two roses across and seventeen roses up and down — and when you squinted your eyes, every second rose had the face of an old lady in a turban and a tippet. The mumps is a tedious disease and aggravated, rather than in the least degree ameliorated, by a continuous process of counting seventeen up and down and thirty-two across. As Mr. Swinburne says, “I shall never be friends again with roses.”
