Stray Leaves from a Border Garden 
especially wild ones, were good as love-charms. The 
present garden carrot was, I think, introduced in the days 
of Queen Elizabeth, and the ladies thought so much of it 
they decked their heads with its leaves. Carrots prepared 
in different ways were valued in medicine as “ cures for 
Spotted Fever and the Bites of Rattlesnakes.” But since 
neither of these ailments seem likely to come my way, I 
do not think I need note the recipes. Carrot soup is truly 
a most excellent thing, and Carrot and Tomato soup, 
though less well known, is also, I think, very good. The 
Turnip is called here Neeps. Turnip-juice extracted from 
the sliced root and brown sugar-candy, baked in an oven, 
used to be deemed a cure for coughs and consumption. 
An old name for Turnips was Knolles, probably from the 
Danish Knold , a tuber. But my wanderings round the 
Kailyard threaten to become interminable, still I cannot 
pass the Cabbage-bed without thinking of the old saying, 
babies are first found in the Cabbage; it looks such a nice 
snug nest for a newborn Baby; indeed, I remember once 
seeing a baby’s smiling face shown peeping out of the green- 
leaf folds of a tiny china cabbage in an ancient china closet. 
I heard once of a Robin building his nest in the heart of 
a Cabbage. The Cabbage-stocks, uninteresting as they look, 
are said to be the horses on which the Scotch fairies ride 
by night. There is an old North-country superstition that, 
if a maiden wants to see her future husband, she must go 
alone into the garden on Hallowe’en and pull up a Kail- 
stock. If she chance on a tall straight one, such will her 
lad be ; but if she light on a poor crooked stump, such in 
appearance will the future husband be. 
The Egyptians built altars to the Cabbage, and the 
Romans as well as the Greeks had a high opinion of its 
virtues. If I remember right, Cato sang its praises, while 
Diocletian’s preference of cabbage-tending to empire- 
tending is well known. I think it is Cats, the Dutch- 
man, who says somewhere it cured all illnesses — a 
delightfully comprehensive statement, beside which the 
modern Irish notion that a cabbage-leaf is a cure for sore- 
