“Those poppies are very pretty, certainly,” said Agnes; “and I should admire them very much in a garden; but I do not like them in a corn field, because papa says they are a proof of bad farming.”
The old gentleman laughed at this, and asked Agnes if she knew the use of poppies, and that opium was made from them.
“Not from that kind, I believe, sir,” said Agnes. “It is the white poppy, is it not, mamma, that produces the opium?”
“Yes,” returned Mrs. Merton; “and it requires a hotter and drier climate than that of England to produce it in perfection. The best opium,” continued Mrs. Merton, “is obtained from Turkey; and, in that country, there are whole fields covered with poppies; and there are people whose principal business it is to watch when the petals of the flowers are falling, and then to wound the unripe capsule of each flower with a double-bladed lancet, so that the milky juice may exude. This milky juice becomes candied by the heat of the sun; and, being scraped off the following morning, forms what is called opium.”
They now passed through a deep cutting of a grey, partially-shining rock, which Mrs. Merton told Agnes was limestone. A little further the rocks became chalky, with narrow rows of flints embedded in them; which looked as though the high bank had been originally a chalk wall, with a row of broken bottles along the top, on which other chalk walls of a similar description had been built. Farther on, the banks of the cutting were formed of more crumbly materials, and appeared to consist entirely of loose sand and powdered chalk.
“What a variety of soils we are going through!” said Agnes.
“Not so great as you imagine,” returned her mother. “Chalk is but another form of limestone, and flint but another form of sand; and these two earths are almost always found together.”
They had now reached the Basingstoke station; and, while some of the passengers were getting down, Agnes amused herself in counting the number of gleaners in a field from which the corn had just been carried.
“There are eighty-two,” said she, after a short pause.
“Eighty-two what?” asked her mother.