"Dandelion, the globe of down,
The schoolboy's clock in every town,
Which the truant puffs amain
To conjure back long hours again."
The ox-eye daisy, the farmer's whiteweed, was brought to New England, so tradition tells, as a garden flower. Now, as Dr. Holmes says, it whitens our fields to the great disgust of our liberal shepherds. It soon followed the dandelion in bloom, and a fresh necklace could be strung from the starry blossoms, a daisy chain, just as English children string their true pink and white daisies. This daisy was also used as a medium of amatory divination, by pulling from the floret the white ray flowers, saying, "He loves me, he loves me not," or by repeating the old "apple-seed rhyme":—
Daisy chain
"One I love,
Two I love,
Three I love, I say,
Four I love with all my heart,
Five I cast away," etc.
Flower oracles are mediæval, and divination by leaves of grass. Children to-day, as of old, draw grass stalks in the field and match them to see who will be "It." Walther von der Vogelweide (1170-1230) did likewise:—
"A spire of grass hath made me gay—
I measured in the self-same way
I have seen practised by a child.
Come, look, and listen if she really does,
She does, does not, she does, does not, she does."
The yellow disk, or "button," of the ox-eye daisy, which was formed by stripping off the white rays, made a pretty pumpkin pie for the dolls' table. A very effective and bilious old lady, or "daisy grandmother," was made by clipping off the rays to shape the border or ruffle of a cap, leaving two long rays for strings, and marking in a grotesque old face with pen and ink. A dusky face, called with childish plainness of speech a "nigger head," could be made in like fashion from the "black-eyed Susan" or "yellow daisy," which now rivals the ox-eye daisy as a pest of New England fields.