Taking a Third Avenue car for home, I secure a quiet corner seat, and say to myself, "I was born in New York city; I know it from one end to the other, particularly all things that are good to eat, but I don't know dellusk.'"
Presently we arrive at the Cooper Institute, and I ask the conductor to let me out. Hastily directing my steps toward the Astor Library, and entering, I ask the librarian for DEL in all the cyclopædias he has. I make a thorough search, and find nothing. Then I think of looking under DUL. What have we here? Not Dellusk by any means, but the following account of Dulse (Rhodomenia palmata): "A sea-weed of a dark purple color growing on rocks. It is used as food by the poor of Ireland, Scotland, Finland, and Iceland, and occasionally by those of the wealthier classes who have acquired a taste for it. It is eaten raw or roasted, or with vinegar as a salad. In Ireland it is boiled with milk, or broiled between hot irons. It is an important plant to the Icelanders, who eat it with zest."
Further on the same author, who is an Englishman, informed me: "In Kamtchatka a fermented liquor is made from it. Sheep are fond of it, eagerly seeking it at low water. 'De-ulse!' was once a common cry in the streets of Scotland. It is common to our coasts, but is imported from Ireland."
Some time after my conversation with the dulse woman, I purchased a pint of the sea-weed from which to obtain a perfect specimen to make a drawing. Taking it home, I left it spread out on my table. It had been there but a short time when "Landy," our old housekeeper, detected the strong odor that rises from it. In a moment she had seized my specimen, and with rapturous delight began to devour it, without even asking permission so to do.
"Oh, the beautiful, darling dellusk!" she exclaimed, between the pauses in the feast! "Shure it's thirty-five years gone last November, whin I was a slip of a girl, an' was clim'ing over the big stones in the big say, a-dryin' yez on them in the sun, till the lovely white salt would flake off, an' 'ating yez every day, till I grew so round and fat and rosy that me mother didn't know me."
I myself tried a bit of the dulse, but I can not say I liked it. At the same time I was glad to learn of one more article of food that I did not before know existed.
[TOPS, AND HOW TO SPIN THEM.]
BY AN OLD BOY.
