Candlemas to Lammas 
earth. No blue ones, however. I do not care much for 
these modern blue ones ; they incline too much to magenta 
and purple to please me. I believe, however, I am wrong 
in calling the Blue Primrose modern. I think it is only a 
revival. 
How pretty the lane is when the thorns are in bloom ! 
And down by the river, on the common, the old gnarled 
hawthorns are so picturesque, all crooked and full of birds, 
who take flight when the milkmaid comes along and calls 
the black cow and her fellows into the shade to milk them. 
In Ireland hawthorns are called Fairy Thorns, and it is 
unlucky to cut them down. There is an old saying, which 
runs, I think, thus : 
Maid who on the first of May 
Goeth a-field at break of day, 
Wash thy face in dew off the hawthorn-tree 
And ever after a fair maid be. 
I am making a new little rockery in the kitchen-garden, 
in an angle of the wall by the red Victoria plum-tree. I 
have got some pretty blue creeping veronica on it, and a 
“ lot of little things,” but I shall get some more when I go 
to the mountains of Auvergne. I think it will be rather a 
success if only the rats will leave it alone, but they seem 
very fond of investigating rockeries. I found to-day my 
little bay-tree in the Rose-garden all wilted, and looking 
quite dead. There was an old-time belief, Italian I think, 
that the withering of a bay-tree meant disaster. I hope it 
does not in this case. Shakespeare makes an allusion to 
this belief in “ Richard II.” : “ ’Tis thought the King is 
dead ; we will not stay ; the bay-trees in our country are 
all withered.” 
June io. — Mont Dore-les-Bains, Auvergne. I have just 
come in from a visit to a most quaint little garden here, a 
series of tiny terraces on a steep hillside, where an old 
photographer with a taste for botany or “ wort-cunning,” as it 
was delightfully called long ago, has collected with patient 
perseverance specimens of the flora of his native mountain 
83 
