PLUM-TREE GUM
My discovery adds particularity now to the remembrance of that mellow place.... A goodly number of antiquated fruit trees were scattered about the cour de récréation. I can now carve it, in fancy, out of the cultivated land shown by the engraver in the most engaging conventional manner, at the back of the northern street front—an acre or so. Perhaps a little more; likelier still, a little less: recollections of this kind have a knack of magnifying affairs. It is bounded by grey walls, tall and thick, but distinctly decrepit. The trees were, of course, long past bearing, through age and neglect; but they were pleasant company, whether snow-laden, or in summer affording their scanty shade. Plum trees they were, I should say. At any rate the rough bark of their boles distilled a kind of brown gum which was in great demand among us small boys for immediate consumption; and sedulously scooped out, as soon as discovered, with the help of the stump end of a steel-pen nib.
Interspersed among these remnants of the forgotten orchard were the odd groups of Lilacs and Acacias previously mentioned. The latter, the Acacias, were tall and above interference. But strict were the standing orders touching the bloom of the Lilac, and dire the prospect of pensum or piquet to the youthful scholar who should dare to pluck the fragrant bunches!
Thus came the Lilac to assume a character at once sacred—or, at least, “taboo”—and at the same time perennially tantalizing. It was long before the realization dawned that Lilas were not the rare and precious blossoms that so uncompromising a prohibition appeared to proclaim. As a matter of fact, the Lilas, Blanc ou Rose, is one of the commonest of spring objects in France. Almost might it in its popularity be regarded as the national emblem of the renouveau, much as with us the pallid, delicate Primrose is held to herald the last of wintry days.
The old French name for the latter is Primerole, suggestive by its etymological connection with “prime,” of the youth of the year. We have made of it Primrose, through the usual process of popular phonetic adaptation, which ever tends to make a word sound like something already familiar. So that the old Primerole—meaning simply an early floweret, primula—has become with us “the early rose”! The French dubbed it Primevère a learned equivalent for the Coucou of the rustic tongue, to symbolize the advent of vernal days.
The name brings at once to mind the well-known yearning lines:
“O Primavera, gioventù dell’ anno!
O gioventù, primavera della vita!”
In France, however, the accepted harbinger of les beaux jours, is not the