Stray Leaves from a Border Garden 
one seems to pick these up but us. Roasted Crabs used 
to be put in ale in Shakespeare’s days ; he mentions them 
several times. I am going to make Crab-apple jelly ; it is 
delicious. An old treatise on Forestry, over two hundred 
years old, which I much delight in for its quaint remarks, 
avers that, re the “Virtue of Crab Juice. This Juice is 
asserted by some to make the strongest and best of cyder, 
provided the Crabs come off a good soil ” (Is the corner of 
the lane a good soil, I wonder ?), “ are of a Right Sort, the 
Liquor artfully made, and a due age given it.” Further, 
“ if people knew the virtue of a Crab,” says an old doctor, 
“ they would value them more than they do,” and proceeds 
to enumerate the ailments it is supposed to be good for • 
but since his wording thereof is like the character of the 
Crab, of a somewhat coarse description, I will not trouble 
to note them. We went Elderberrying to-day with a view 
to Elder-wine, armed each with a hooked stick to pull down 
the branches ; baskets, lined with white paper, and scissors, 
which last were scarcely needed to cut off the bunches of 
fruit. The birds, however, had been before us, and some 
of the ripest bunches had lost a good many berries. It 
was delightful climbing on the fence picking the sweet- 
smelling bunches of tiny black berries, the baskets seemed 
to fill in a minute. The lane was looking lovely, the high 
hedge all ablaze with the red-berried Hawthorns, green- 
leaved Elders, and red and yellow Brambles (Ang.-Sax. 
bremhel ), and the Ferns in the wayside ditch beginning to 
turn brown and curl. 
I never saw such large red hips as the Roses have in that 
lane, or such bright-coloured ones. I saw a small child 
wearing a necklet of them ; at a distance it looked like big 
red beads. I think I will try if these Sweetbriar hips would 
do to make jelly of, like the hips of Rosa Rugosa, the big 
Japanese kind out of which one can make the most 
delicious jelly, looking and tasting somewhat like Guava- 
jelly. I know a garden far away by the Western sea where 
there is a lovely hedge of Rugosa, and high-heaped baskets 
of glowing hips are brought in for jelly. And this is my 
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