30 FAMILIAR WILD FLOWERS. 



peculiar bloom to the hillside, and contrasting finely with 

 the rich colour of the rock and the brilliant tint of the 

 oak foliage, as the sun shone through the leaves and turned 

 them emerald. The second locality was within a short 

 omnibus ride of the metropolis, a lane that we had known 

 in its more picturesque days, and which probably now has 

 been overwhelmed by the great onward march of the men 

 of bricks and mortar. The sides of this lane were high 

 and steep, the soil was poor and dry, and these banks 

 abundantly bore the plant we have figured. The wood-sage 

 is common enough almost everywhere, and we can only 

 imagine that these two localities are more especially 

 engraven on our memory because it was from these un- 

 doubtedly that our less pleasant memories of the wood-sage 

 are derived. A decoction of the plant is held to be very 

 tonic in its effects, and if the popular theory that a 

 medicine must be good because it is nasty has any 

 truth in it, the virtues of wood-sage must be considerable. 

 The plant is, undoubtedly, an exceedingly bitter one, and 

 some amateur doctors fall into the error of thinking that 

 because some undoubted remedies are very bitter that 

 therefore any bitter is in turn a remedy. At the same 

 time it is only fair to say that, in the rustic pharmacopoeia, 

 the plant holds an honoured place which it would scarcely 

 retain if it did not possess some value ; and it belongs to 

 an order that is rich in plants of economic and medicinal 

 service sage, peppermint, marjoram, horehound some of 

 them, as the self-heal and the wound-wort, testifying in their 

 very names to the esteem in which they were held. It has 

 been suggested that this bitter principle would make it an 

 excellent substitute for hops in brewing, and those who 

 have tried it affirm that the beer clears sooner than when 



