86 THE BOOK OF FRUIT BOTTLING 
one occasionally comes across an old recipe still in use, 
or the fragrance of perfume compounded according to 
an old formula, a syrup or a sweetly tasting wine, even 
perhaps a potent liquor, warranted home made. ‘There 
we may meet an old house-keeper still willing to descant 
on some curative mixture, of the ingredients of which 
she alone has the secret. But these survivals are but 
far-off echoes of what once were the customary duties 
and habits of gentlewomen, and no one would propose 
to recommend a return to such dull and uninteresting 
occupations. I confess, however, that I nourish a sort 
of sentimental regret for some of these old forgotten 
pursuits. [hese reflections, indeed, I have here in- 
dulged in, by way of an introduction to some specimens 
of cures and recipes of past days which have come to 
my notice, and some of which are certainly more curious 
from an antiquarian point of view than practical or 
useful, even in their own times, except in so far as 
they were garnished with that delightful all-pervading 
medieval quality of faith which one may almost assever 
had such an influence that it did indeed lend a wondrous 
eficacy to the most unpromising and apparently incon- 
gruous cures, both for mind and body; while the simpler 
recipes of a later age, when miracles had ceased in the 
land, are at least as curious in their way, representing 
as they do an outcome of the patience and practical 
efforts of successive generations of our ancestors who, 
while looking on the vanished age of faith as a period 
of vain superstition, were themselves the credulous 
supporters of the traditional virtues of their various 
concoctions and remedies. The old folk’s cures and 
the medieval charms and panaceas are now alike dis- 
carded as futile, and superseded by patent medicines 
and scientific methods of treatment; while scents and 
preserves, pickles and sweetmeats, are manufactured by 
the gross on modern principles, and the individual must 
