Stray Leaves from a Border Garden 
fairies, seem to be partial, by all accounts, to mortal nurses 
for their infants, and lose no opportunity of stealing new- 
made mothers therefor. In this case the wretched husband 
rushed after his Maggie, crying on the fairies to let her go 
in Heaven’s name. They were obliged to drop her, but 
her spirit remained “ mazed.” She took “ no interest ever 
after in any mortal thing, not even her own bairns ” ; she 
just “ dwaumed away,” and died shortly afterwards. 
At Billy, the burn called the Draedan Burn, over which 
the fairies tried to carry Maggie, is said to have been named 
after the Druids, and there were granite blocks there 
within the memory of man which wise men say formed 
part of a Druidic temple. The Cowslips I got from 
Weymouth have now taken to their new quarters wonder- 
fully ; they are throwing up giant spikes of bloom. Petty 
Mulleins is a nice old name for them ; they are also 
called Herb Peter ; and Cowslip wine, which does not seem 
to be made nowadays, is said in my old Herbal to be 
“ Cordial and Confortative, and refreshes the Spirits,” and 
a Cowslip tincture is recommended as excellent in Palsy 
and divers other ailments, whence the Cowslip is also called 
Palsywort, a mere translation of Herba Paralysis. My 
other colony of Devon Daffodils, called Lent Roses in 
Devon, have never come up at all, nor has the big grey-eyed 
Provengal Periwinkle : I suppose it found this climate too 
cold. I planted last year a row of Grape Hyacinths, sent 
from a vineyard in Southern France, where they grew 
beautifully under the old crooked Olive-trees, and one tiny 
solitary bloom has come up, looking like a fairy flower, so 
very small is it. A few yards away there is a splendid 
bloom of the same, but this plant is home-grown, having 
been transplanted from a neighbour’s garden-plot. The ferns 
are beginning to sprout ; their curled-up leaves, looking like 
green Bishops’ Croziers, are to be seen under every bush 
now. A quaint old Scotch expression for sunburn or 
freckles is to be “ fernitickled,” because of the likeness to 
the seed-spreckled back of a fern. 
In the “ West Country ” there is a belief that the first 
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