258 KALM'S ENGLAND. 



lime they use here for their houses, and where they get 

 the same ? He answered, that they dig up ordinary chalk 

 out of the chalk hills, lay it together in heaps, and burn 

 it in the same way as is usual in burning lime from lime- 

 stone, kalk-sten, when the chalk, after it has been burnt, 

 is reduced to a fine powder or meal, which is an ordinary 

 lime. With this lime blended with flint-sand, they build 

 all their brick or stone houses. All those who lived round 

 about this place, told me as a very well known and com- 

 mon thing, that the chalk is burnt by them everywhere 

 to lime, by being laid in lime kilns, kalk-ugnar, and 

 after burning is slaked, of which more further on. 



Naslor til grdnkal. Nettles as Green-meat. 

 When the nettles first come up in the spring, they 

 are plucked by the women, and prepared as green-meat, 

 gronkal, in the same way and method as we in Sweden 

 prepare Spinat. They here maintain that nettles prepared 

 thus or in any other way, and eaten, are very wholesome, 

 and purify the blood.* 



Dagg-maskar, en begarlig mat for Anckor. 



Earth-worms a favorite food of Ducks. 

 Everywhere on the range, at Little Gaddesden, as well 

 as the villages round about, the whole of the ground 

 appears to be full of worm-holes. Close to all these 

 holes are found small heaps of fine mould, mull, which 

 the worm had heaved up when it made the hole [worm- 



* Nettle Salad. I enquired at Ivinghoe whether this is still made. 

 The negative answer is inconclusive, as it is still prepared in Surrey, 1886, 

 where they only call them boiled nettles. Sir W. Hooker (Flora, 5th Ed. 

 1842) says : "In Scotland the young tops of nettles are boiled and eaten by 

 the common people." (U dioica, p. 296.) Sir W. Scott also: "Nae doubt I 

 suld understand my ain trade of horticulture, seeing I was bred in the parish 

 of Dreepdaily, near Glasco', where they raise lang-kail under glass, and 

 force the eu-ly nettles for their spri g kail" Andrew Fairservice in Rob 

 Roy. [J.L.] 



