318 THE BOOK OF A NATURALIST 



common with us. And it is indeed in appearance a 

 lesser dandelion on a thin tall plant, the blooms, 

 half-a-dozen or so to a plant, on long fine stems. 

 It interests me chiefly on account of its singular, 

 unflowerlike behaviour, which the name describes ; 

 also on account of its other queer name and the 

 meaning thereof. I don't mean goat's-beard, but 

 its third old English name which now, like many 

 another, has grown offensive to ears polite, and has 

 long been banished from our flower books, and even 

 the dictionaries. One must go back to the old 

 writers to find it in print : not necessarily so far 

 back as Chaucer, who is too disgusting for anything, 

 but to the Elizabethan and Carolines. The banned 

 name, however, is still in use in the rural districts. 



What I have written so far was all I could have 

 said about this yellow flower until last summer ; 

 and if in time gone by any one had said to me that 

 a day would come when Johnnie would appear to 

 me as a wonder and delight, I should have laughed. 

 Yet the strange experience actually came to me 

 last June. 



At a Cornish village there was a field near the 

 cottage where I was staying, where my host had 

 allowed his half-a-dozen cows to graze during the 

 winter months : in April he turned them out, and 

 a month later, passing by the field, it appeared to 

 me that it would yield him a heavy crop of grass. 

 One morning in June, looking at the field from a 

 distance, it struck me that the hay would not be 

 of a very good quality since the entire area had now 



