OF SUNDRY HERBS 43 



should be well thinned (eighteen inches apart), and it is 

 better not to transplant them. 



To CANDY BORAGE, OR ROSEMARY FLOWERS. Boil Sugar 

 and Rose-water a little upon a chafing-dish with coales : 

 then put the flowers (being thorowly dried, either by the 

 Sun or by the Fire) into the Sugar, and boile them a little : 

 then strew the powder of double refined Sugar upon them, 

 and turne them, and let them boile a little longer, taking 

 the dish from the Fire : then strew more powdered Sugar 

 on the contrary side of the flowers. These will dry of 

 themselves in two or three houres in a hot sunny day, though 

 they lie not in the Sunne. The Queen's Closet Opened, by 

 W. M., Cook to Queen Henrietta Maria, 1655. 



CONSERVE OF BORAGE FLOWERS AFTER THE ITALIAN 

 MANNER. Take of fresh Borage flowers four ounces, fine 

 Sugar twelve ounces, beat them well together in a stone 

 Mortar, and keep them in a vessel well glazed. Ibid. 



BRAMBLE 



" Then said all the trees unto the bramble, Come thou 

 and reign over us ! And the bramble said unto the trees, 

 If in truth ye anoint me King over you, then come and put 

 your trust in my shadow ; and if not let fire come out of 

 the bramble, and devour the Cedars of Lebanon." 

 Judges ix. 14. 



According to tradition, the bramble was the burning bush 

 in which Jehovah appeared to Moses. A good many curious 

 superstitions cling to the bramble, and one still hears of 

 cases of the survival of the old custom of passing sickly 

 children nine times over and under a blackberry stem, 

 rooted at both ends, and this must always be done with the 

 sun, i. e. from east to west. Throughout the British Isles 

 there is a widespread belief amongst the old peasantry that 

 on Michaelmas day the Devil curses all the blackberry 

 bushes, and that is why the fruit is so unwholesome in the 

 late autumn. In Cornwall bramble leaves moistened with 



