THE JPOX-GLOTE — SCABIOUS. 233 



up its beautiful stem of rose-coloured flowers, tiger-spotted 

 and white within, and hanging from one side to the height of 

 four or five feet; but it is only on roads which are on the skirts 

 of woods, in whose coolness and shade the plant delights. 



Beautiful as it is, the digitalis is a dangerous plant; it 

 exercises a singular influence over man ; it impedes the circu- 

 lation of the blood ; no animal touches it. 



I have assembled in my garden several of these nymphs of 

 the fields and woods, and every year they blossom larger and 

 grow more handsome. 



One plant, which in the garden is generally of so dark a 

 purple that it appears black pricked with white points, is 

 called the scabious, or the widow's flower. In its wild state, 

 it is of a pretty lilac, which would scarcely permit us to 

 say it was in half-mourning. 



Women, in fact, have thought proper to admit, as a mourn- 

 ing colour, one of the most fresh and charming of colours ; lilac 

 is the mourning of far-advanced grief — it is the transition 

 from grey to rose-colour. 



The invention of lilac for mourning is an invention analo- 

 gous to that of teal, wild-duck, and moor -hen as fasting food 

 for Lent ; it is one of the numerous accommodations made 

 daily with heaven as with ordinary evils. 



The scabious enjoyed formerly a very enviable position in 

 the world; it radically cured several more than disagreeable 

 maladies, among which, not the least so, was the itch. 



The devil, it is said, furious that this precious plant should 

 thus thwart the operations of some of his ministers, took 

 delight in biting off the extremity of its roots, in the hope of 

 destroying it ; and to convince the incredulous, this root is 

 still shown with its extremity cut or broken off, at least in 

 one of the varieties of the scabious. But it may be well 

 imagined that the scabious, which cured others so well, had 

 not much trouble in curing itself. 



It appears that now-a-days the scabious is strangely fallen ; 

 that it no longer cures anything, and that it only serves as 

 an asylum for three or four insects ; at least we find these 

 judgments pronounced against it in books of both ancient 

 and modern medicine. 



Since morning, the heavens have been concealed by thick 



