STRAWBERRY LEAVES. 99 



all remember how Mrs. Gaskell in her delightful 

 story gives Lady Ludlow the power, but now we 

 all seem to have lost it. Certainly my dying 

 Strawberry leaves give me no sense of sweetness. 

 Was it a mere fond and foolish fancy ? or were the 

 Strawberries of Elizabethan gardens different from 

 those we are now growing ? Bacon tells us that, 

 next to the white double Violet and the Musk 

 Rose, the sweetest perfume in the open air is 

 '' Strawberry leaves dying, which yield a most 

 excellent cordiale smell ; " and I find in an old 

 play by Sir John Suckling 



"Wholesome 

 As dying leaves of Strawberries." 



But there are sounds that haunt a garden hardly 

 less delightful than its sights and scents. What 

 sound has more poetry in it than when in the early 

 morning one hears the strong sharp sweep of the 

 scythe, as it whistles through the falling grass, or 

 the shrill murmur of the blade upon the whet- 

 stone ; and, in spite of mowing machines, at times 

 one hears the old sound still. How fond Andrew 

 Marvell was of mowing and the mowers ! He has 

 given us " Damon the Mower," "The Mower to the 

 Glow-worm," " The Mower's Song," " The Mower 



II 2 



