In the fourteenth century, I have been told, snails were sold at Bath and in other towns in the west, to such as had consumptive tendencies. Knowing this, and seeing how much escargots were used in the Middle Ages, not only as a delicacy by the monks and nobles, but also in medicine with herbs, presumably amongst the poor, it is curious now, the horror that exists at the thought of eating either snails or frogs. At first, when I gave some dinners to the very needy, they would hardly dare come for them, and declared that they were sure that in Auguste’s ragouts there would be found some lurking, somewhere.
“Us doesn’t dare to search in the broth,” one old man said, “for us doesn’t know what low beasts, slugs, snails, tadpoles, and what not a foreigner mightn’t mix in.” But now happily they are reassured, and old Ged Bebb told me only last week, “That, for all that they war heathan (the cook men), the meat war good, and proper, and what Christian folks cud eat.”
FLOWERS OF TWILIGHT
I passed into the old red-walled garden and stopped to admire the long line of brilliant yellow crocuses. They were all aglow in the brilliant sunlight, and stood drawn up like a regiment of soldiers in line. I stood entranced, for each soldier seemed to be holding a lamp, and in each lamp, or cup, the sun was reflected in a wonderful golden glory. It is hardly possible to exaggerate the beauty of golden crocuses in golden sunlight. They seem to fill the world with gladness and to be March’s crowning glory. I stopped and looked at my clumps of crocuses, they were coming up gaily, but were yet hardly in blossom.
Burbidge put in for me strong clumps of Sir Walter Scott, Rizzio, and of beautiful Mont Blanc. All these were pushing up bravely, out of their mother earth. In fact, they were bursting, as Bess calls it, to be out.
A minute later, I turned to inspect my chionodoxas and scillas. A few were coming into bloom. Luciliae had several sprays of delicate china blue and white flowers, and coppery two-blade leaves, and a patch of blue Scilla Sibirica had reared already a spray or two of gorgeous ultramarine blossoms; but it was still early in March, and that is the time of the promise of beautiful things, not yet the realization of Flora’s fête.
As I went by a bush of white Daphne, I heard that the bees had discovered this spring delight—they were buzzing quite fiercely round its tiny flowerets. What a perfume the Daphne has! What an enchantment of rich odours! The pink bush on the other side of the garden I noted would blossom shortly, but there is quite ten days’ difference in the flowering of the two varieties. The white follows “on the feet of snow,” as Burbidge expresses it, and the pink, “when the spring has come.” Of daffodils there was no sign as yet, save the little hard green spikes, but the purple hellebores were proud in their sombre magnificence. These always seem to me flowers that might fitly have decked the brows of some great enchantress, Morgan le Fay, or the Lady of the Lake. They vary from green to darkest purple, and they seem hardly flowers of gaiety or morning, but rather the shadowy blooms of twilight. Unlike their sister, the beautiful Helleborus niger, they will not live, plucked, in water. When gathered, they fade almost instantaneously and hang their heads in spite of salt or charcoal being added to the water. I have heard it said that if the stalks be cunningly split first, before being put in water, that they will last some time; but I cannot say I have ever found this plan successful, and have come to the conclusion that if you want to see your purple hellebores in beauty, you must go into the garden to do so.
Then, as I walked on, I noted that the white arabis was flowering in places. Such a dear, homely little flower as it is, much loved by the bees who had gathered to it like to a honey jar. As I stood watching “the little brown people,” I heard the guttural click-click of the little common wren. What a tiny little bird she is, the Jenny Wren of the old nursery rhyme—“God Almighty’s hen,” some of the old folk still call her here. It is wonderful to think that so deep a note can come out of so small a body.
Jenny hopped about from twig to twig, gaily enough, cocked her tail, and was, according to Burbidge, as “nimble as ninepence.”
THE NEST IN THE KETTLE