FERN SEED
The other was of Gadshill boast: “We steal as in a castle, cock-sure: we have the receipt of fern-seed”—which irresistibly, by concatenation, brought in the image of my dear if disreputable old friend Falstaff and how he would have “larded the lean earth” as he spudded along. Now it occurs to me that if the receipt of fern-seed as handed down by tradition is in any way correct, this is the last day when this fern massacre can be of any use, as far as Villino Loki is concerned, to prevent its propagation for this year. Is not to-morrow St. John’s Eve; and is not that the date upon which the invisible seed—which once successfully gathered will confer upon the gatherer the power of invisibility—drops upon the soil?
The harvest, it seems, must be made “in the dark of the moon,” at the exact turning of midnight, and received in a pewter plate; without regard to the beguiling pranks of fairy or goblin, who, naturally enough, are jealous of the acquisition by mere mortals of this essential attribute of their order. The receipt does not state how the pewter-harvested seed, being invisible, is to be bottled up or otherwise preserved for use when required.
This, by the way, is a fairly typical instance of the manner in which our mediæval superstitions were shrouded in cryptic conditions, the failure of any one of which in the smallest particular would plausibly explain away the failure of the whole charm.—We can easily understand the paucity of invisible mortals at all times.
Well, I for one have no desire for such a charm. The temptation to use it would be distracting. And conceive the endless trouble, picture to yourself the misconceptions, you would raise into your own mind if you possessed the power at any moment of prying, invisible, into the innermost life of your best friends, or your enemies ... and of hearing what they might happen to say about you!
No. Yet I would some power gave me the gift to gather all the invisible seed at Villino Loki: I would burn it once and for all.
CROSSES DE FOUGERE, A LA JAPONAISE
One cannot help wondering that so little use should be made of all this vegetable wealth. There it is, covering square leagues of common land, to be harvested by whosoever list. In former days, indeed, it was gathered in and burnt for “potashes”—chiefly for glass-making. And therein lies the explanation of the wine “laughing in the fougère”; ash of fougère, or Bracken, had in the “grand Roy’s” days become synonymous with glass itself. Again, in its dry condition, Brake was once extensively used for thatching and for litter; in some parts of the country the young plant was given as fodder to cattle and horses. Now, however, county councils forbid the building of thatch, our up-to-date cattle and horses are too fastidious as to litter and fodder, and we import our potashes. Meanwhile, Bracken threatens everywhere to stifle the Heather on our moors.
If I remember right, in some parts of France the poorer people make use of young Brake as food. And this reminds me that, some years ago, I heard the last Japanese Ambassador remark at dinner—à propos of the Asparagus that was just going round—that he wondered we should not make use in the kitchen of the Bracken he had noticed growing in such enormous and neglected quantities in England. In his country, he assured us, they eat the young shoots, when still in their folded “crozier” stage, precisely as we over here eat Asparagus, and consider them not only as delicacies, but as particularly wholesome and nutritious.
The recipe for cooking them is simple. The croziers, cut just short of the roots, are to be parboiled in strongly salted water; the first water, which extracts some unpleasantly bitter principle, is to be quickly poured off; then the shoots, thoroughly drained of this first water, are boiled in a large quantity of fresh water, drained again carefully and served with oil or butter, very much like our Sprue.