“Look at your face, too, Billy,” laughed Somebody. “You surely did splash.”
“Guess I did,” said Billy, as he repaired the damage. “I couldn’t resist those strawberries. Where did they get the name from?”
“Nobody knows—at least nobody whom I have been able to trace,” said Somebody. “I’ve always been interested in that question myself, and I’ve consulted many authorities and have found out just exactly as much as the two people found out from each other in the early English rhyme, which goes:
“Ye manne of ye wildernesse asked me,
How many strauberies growe in ye sea?
I answer maybe as I thought goode
As manie red herring as growe in ye woode.”
“That sounds as though they didn’t find out a blessed thing,” said the boy named Billy.
“Exactly,” laughed Somebody. “Izaak Walton’s tribute to the strawberry in the ‘Compleat Angler’ is very well known. He said, ‘Doubtless God could have made a better berry, but doubtless God never did.’ The only information I have been able to gather is that ‘the strawberry is a perennial herb of the genus fragaria, order of rosacea,’—that it ‘appears to have been a native of Eastern North America where it appears as a common wild strawberry.’ The strawberry seems to have been grown in gardens less than six hundred years, for though knowledge of it goes back to the time of Virgil, and perhaps earlier, it was not cultivated by the people.
“The Germans have some beautiful legends concerning it. It is said that the Goddess Frigga was very fond of the fruit and that it was supposed to be her task to go with the children to gather them on St. John’s day; and that on that day no mother who had lost a little child would taste a strawberry because if she did, the little one in Paradise could have none; because the mother on earth had already had the share belonging to it.