174 THE ROLL OF THE SEASONS 



vegetables, it may be said that the cabbage was 

 scarcely more important to the sirloin or griskin than 

 the mint is to-day to the green peas or new potatoes. 

 That is to say, vegetables were unimportant from the 

 food point of view. We took them as the cat and dog 

 take couch-grass as medicines, and so badly did our 

 staple food of meat serve us, that as time went on we 

 cultivated in this kitchen garden of ours a vast number 

 of herbs that we never hear spoken of to-day. 



The sweetest of them have survived with the flowers. 

 We all know lavender, marjoram, thyme, sage, mint ; 

 many of us rosemary, hyssop, sweet-basil, borage, dill. 

 But where are alecost, clary, dittander, fenugreek, 

 lovage, skirrets, smallage, and a hundred others that 

 were once deemed essential to the happiness of every 

 housewife. We can find no trace of them. Long ago 

 their places were required, and none of them are of 

 stalwart fibre enough to live as guerillas with the 

 spade and hoe always against them. But there is a 

 certain other sinister family that has taken its dis- 

 missal by no means so tamely. Let us test the 

 significance of their names even in their Latin guise. 

 Atropa belladonna, Hyoscyamus niger, Solatium, 

 Datura. They still signify something because, being 

 among the most potent of the old herbs, they are still 

 notorious in the pharmacopoeia. Deadly-nightshade 

 has gone. Such outspoken villainy could not be 

 expected to escape the attentions of a hostile gar- 

 dener. But sometimes even now its woody friend, 

 the bitter-sweet, climbs up the roots of a peach tree 

 and manages to set its tomato-like fruit, and the 

 expeditious black nightshade rears its tiny tree in 

 the rich soil between diggings, ripens its berries, and 



