VILLAGE MINEBS. 151 



The backwoodsmen have found out many ways of 

 curing cuts, wounds, bruises and injuries, rough 

 methods, but effectual, and use the herbs and leaves 

 much as their English forefathers did a century ago. 

 For the most part in villages the knowledge and use 

 of herbs has died out, and there are not many who 

 resort to them. Elder-flower ointment, however, 

 keeps its ground, and is, I think, still made for sale in 

 the shops of towns. But the true country elder-flower 

 ointment contains a little piece of adder 's-tongue fern, 

 which is believed to confer magical virtue. So curious 

 a plant may naturally have had a mysterious value 

 attached to it in old times. It is the presence of this 

 touch of home-lore in the recipe which makes the 

 product so different from the " ointment of the apothe- 

 cary," manufactured by scale and weight and prosaic 

 rule. Upon some roofs the houseleek still grows, 

 though it is now often torn away as injurious. Where 

 it grows it is usually on outhouses attached to the 

 main building, sloping lean-tos. It does not present 

 so glowing an appearance as the stonecrop, which now 

 and then flourishes on houses, and looks like a brilliant 

 golden cushion against the red tiles. The houseleek, 

 however, is a singular plant, worthy of examination ; 

 it has an old-world look, as if it had survived beyond 

 its date into the nineteenth century. It hides in 

 odd places and gables like a relic of witchcraft, and a 

 black cat and an aged woman with a crutch-handled 

 stick would be its appropriate owner. The houseleek 

 is still used for the cure of wounds and cuts. A leaf 

 — the leaves are rather like portions of the plant than 

 mere leaves — is bruised to pulp, and the juice and some 



