Poppies. 1 7 



(to which esculent, I confess, I have however been 

 fully converted in the South), and he said, " In Scot- 

 land I have eaten nettles, slept on nettle-sheets, and 

 dined off a nettle table-cloth." The fibre is, however, 

 much more difficult to prepare for weaving than that 

 of the flax, otherwise it might have found much more 

 favour as a fabric. But the more one looks into 

 matters, the more one is convinced that in nature there 

 are no " neer-do-weels," as, alas ! there are in the 

 human family. 



And I also allow a thistle or two. I have, alas ! none 

 of the true Scottish thistle, which, when Burns found 

 " Spreading wide, among the bearded bear, 



He turned the weeding clips aside 



And spared the symbol dear," 



but only a few of the milk thistle, which is, however, 

 very beautiful, with its streaks of white on the leaves 

 from which it takes its name. I have 

 also a few poppies, flaunting red in their 

 season, and later displaying their semi- 

 globular seed-head, which gently rattles 

 when shaken, like a toy-drum, the very 

 type and symbol of gay society — the 

 last of a race which it took long to ex- 

 tirpate from the garden, and which are 

 now, like the Iberians of Spain, pushed 

 into the remotest corner, and tolerated poppy. 



and ruthlessly kept down even there. But he were a 

 very churl of propriety and utilitarianism, who would 

 not allow a representative of the wondrous sleep- 

 inducing papavers in such a plot, to remind him of 

 so much of Homer and the poets, and one secret of 

 mysterious might in the modern pharmacopoeia, and 

 also of the wreck of many geniuses in later days — 



B 



